An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

India, 1920. Captain Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee of the Calcutta Police Force investigate the dramatic assassination of a Maharajah's son. The fabulously wealthy kingdom of Sambalpore is home to tigers, elephants, diamond mines and the beautiful Palace of the Sun. But when the heir to the throne is assassinated in the presence of Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant 'Surrender-Not' Banerjee, they discover a kingdom riven with suppressed conflict. Prince Adhir was a moderniser whose attitudes - and romantic relationship - may have upset the more religious elements of his country, while his brother – now in line to the throne – appears to be a feckless playboy. As Wyndham and Banerjee desperately try to unravel the mystery behind the assassination, they become entangled in a dangerous world where those in power live by their own rules and those who cross their paths pay with their lives. They must find a murderer, before the murderer finds them…

'A tender, elegant novel about the beauty and importance of friendship. Colin Morgan’s debut is one of the most moving books I’ve read in some time' John Boyne ***** 'Soaring, lyrical and heart-breaking. A tender and important new voice in Irish writing' Michelle Gallen 'A fresh and authentic voice is found in this impressive and original debut about grief, loss and the enduring power of love' Christine Dwyer Hickey *** A tender coming-of-age story about friendship, first love, loss, and facing the ultimate who am I going to be? For fans of Douglas Stuart, Michael Magee, David Nicholls and Andrew O'Hagan Brendan's best friend, his only friend, is Ronan McCoy. He knows things about Brendan that no one else about his job washing the cars at Feeney’s Funeral Home, about the loneliness he sometimes feels even when surrounded by hundreds of others at school. But Brendan never told Ronan about the dark feeling that sits at the bottom of his stomach, the feeling that tells him something bad is coming. It never comes when Ronan's around. Ronan is smart and sporty and popular, totally comfortable in his own all the things that Brendan himself isn't. But Ronan always makes him feel like a good friend, a good person, a better Brendan. Standing at the school gates on the first day of term, the dark feeling begins to form in Brendan's stomach. And when Ronan doesn’t turn up, Brendan learns that something terrible happened to his best friend over the summer and he'll never be the same again. Over the course of the final year of school, Brendan will have to learn to navigate the new shape of their friendship and find a place for himself in the world without Ronan to protect him. The Ballad of Ronan McCoy is a beautifully written, tender coming-of-age story about friendship and first love, loss and letting go, and the hopes and fears of a young man standing on the cusp of the rest of his life.

Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó’s books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned. She fights with her fellow students, she rebels against her teachers, finds herself completely ostracized, and runs away. Caught and brought back, there is nothing for Gina to do except entrust her fate to the legendary Abigail, as the classical statue of a woman with an urn that stands on the school’s grounds has come to be called. If you’re in trouble, it’s said, leave a message with Abigail and help will be on the way. And for Gina, who is in much deeper trouble than she could possibly suspect, a life-changing adventure is only beginning. There is something of Jane Austen in this story of the deceptiveness of appearances; fans of J.K. Rowling are sure to enjoy Szabó’s picture of irreverent students, eccentric teachers, and boarding-school life. Above all, however, Abigail is a thrilling tale of suspense.

From the Booker Prize finalist author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two rivers, all under the shadow of one of the greatest epic poems of all time. “Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf… you won’t regret it.” (Arundhati Roy) In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives. In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains. In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time. In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything. A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

'A tender, elegant novel about the beauty and importance of friendship. Colin Morgan’s debut is one of the most moving books I’ve read in some time' John Boyne ***** 'Soaring, lyrical and heart-breaking. A tender and important new voice in Irish writing' Michelle Gallen 'A fresh and authentic voice is found in this impressive and original debut about grief, loss and the enduring power of love' Christine Dwyer Hickey *** A tender coming-of-age story about friendship, first love, loss, and facing the ultimate who am I going to be? For fans of Douglas Stuart, Michael Magee, David Nicholls and Andrew O'Hagan Brendan's best friend, his only friend, is Ronan McCoy. He knows things about Brendan that no one else about his job washing the cars at Feeney’s Funeral Home, about the loneliness he sometimes feels even when surrounded by hundreds of others at school. But Brendan never told Ronan about the dark feeling that sits at the bottom of his stomach, the feeling that tells him something bad is coming. It never comes when Ronan's around. Ronan is smart and sporty and popular, totally comfortable in his own all the things that Brendan himself isn't. But Ronan always makes him feel like a good friend, a good person, a better Brendan. Standing at the school gates on the first day of term, the dark feeling begins to form in Brendan's stomach. And when Ronan doesn’t turn up, Brendan learns that something terrible happened to his best friend over the summer and he'll never be the same again. Over the course of the final year of school, Brendan will have to learn to navigate the new shape of their friendship and find a place for himself in the world without Ronan to protect him. The Ballad of Ronan McCoy is a beautifully written, tender coming-of-age story about friendship and first love, loss and letting go, and the hopes and fears of a young man standing on the cusp of the rest of his life.

'A tender, elegant novel about the beauty and importance of friendship. Colin Morgan’s debut is one of the most moving books I’ve read in some time' John Boyne ***** 'Soaring, lyrical and heart-breaking. A tender and important new voice in Irish writing' Michelle Gallen 'A fresh and authentic voice is found in this impressive and original debut about grief, loss and the enduring power of love' Christine Dwyer Hickey *** A tender coming-of-age story about friendship, first love, loss, and facing the ultimate who am I going to be? For fans of Douglas Stuart, Michael Magee, David Nicholls and Andrew O'Hagan Brendan's best friend, his only friend, is Ronan McCoy. He knows things about Brendan that no one else about his job washing the cars at Feeney’s Funeral Home, about the loneliness he sometimes feels even when surrounded by hundreds of others at school. But Brendan never told Ronan about the dark feeling that sits at the bottom of his stomach, the feeling that tells him something bad is coming. It never comes when Ronan's around. Ronan is smart and sporty and popular, totally comfortable in his own all the things that Brendan himself isn't. But Ronan always makes him feel like a good friend, a good person, a better Brendan. Standing at the school gates on the first day of term, the dark feeling begins to form in Brendan's stomach. And when Ronan doesn’t turn up, Brendan learns that something terrible happened to his best friend over the summer and he'll never be the same again. Over the course of the final year of school, Brendan will have to learn to navigate the new shape of their friendship and find a place for himself in the world without Ronan to protect him. The Ballad of Ronan McCoy is a beautifully written, tender coming-of-age story about friendship and first love, loss and letting go, and the hopes and fears of a young man standing on the cusp of the rest of his life.

India, 1920. Captain Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee of the Calcutta Police Force investigate the dramatic assassination of a Maharajah's son. The fabulously wealthy kingdom of Sambalpore is home to tigers, elephants, diamond mines and the beautiful Palace of the Sun. But when the heir to the throne is assassinated in the presence of Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant 'Surrender-Not' Banerjee, they discover a kingdom riven with suppressed conflict. Prince Adhir was a moderniser whose attitudes - and romantic relationship - may have upset the more religious elements of his country, while his brother – now in line to the throne – appears to be a feckless playboy. As Wyndham and Banerjee desperately try to unravel the mystery behind the assassination, they become entangled in a dangerous world where those in power live by their own rules and those who cross their paths pay with their lives. They must find a murderer, before the murderer finds them…

An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

Ain’t nothing wrong with being broken. Nothing at all. You’re like these houses, not a whole brick in em and look how strong they are. As Tess traces the sunrise over the floodplains, light that paints the house a startling crimson, she yearns for the comforting chaos of life as it once was. Instead of Max and Sonny tracking dirt through the kitchen – Tess and Richard’s ‘rainbow twins’ – Tess absorbs the quiet. The nights draw in, the soil cools and Richard fights to get his winter crops planted rather than deal with the discussion he cannot bear to have. Secrets and vines clamber over the broken red bricks and although its inhabitants seem to be withering, in the damp, crumbling soil – Sonny knows it – something is stirring . . . As the seasons change, and the cracks let in more light, the family might just be able to start to heal. This is the story of a broken family, what they see and what they cannot say laid bare in their overlapping perspectives. It is a tale of life in the cracks, because in the space for acceptance, of passing and of laying to rest, the possibilities of new energy, light and love, are seeded.

In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears for the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story as the stuff of legends. Nainoa's family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods - a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor begins to drive the family apart: Nainoa, working now as a paramedic on the streets of Portland, struggles to fathom the full measure of his expanding abilities; further north in Washington, his older brother Dean hurtles into the world of elite college athletics, obsessed with wealth and fame; while in California, risk-obsessed younger sister Kaui navigates an unforgiving academic workload in an attempt to forge her independence from the family's legacy. When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawaii - with tragic consequences - they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival. One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020. Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the New York Times (#30), the Guardian, the Boston Globe, Oprah Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, BBC Culture, Good Housekeeping, LitHub, Spectrum Culture, Third Place Books, and Powell's Books.