From bestselling author Meagan Church comes a haunting exploration of identity, motherhood, and the suffocating grip of societal expectations that will leave you questioning the lives we build―and the lies we live.  They called it hysteria. She called it survival. Lulu Mayfield has spent the last five years molding herself into the perfect 1950s housewife. Despite the tragic memories that haunt her and the weight of exhausting expectations, she keeps her husband happy, her household running, and her gelatin salads the talk of the neighborhood. But after she gives birth to her second child, Lulu's carefully crafted life begins to unravel. When a new neighbor, Bitsy, moves in, Lulu suspects that something darker lurks behind the woman's constant smile. As her fixation on Bitsy deepens, Lulu is drawn into a web of unsettling truths that threaten to expose the cracks in her own life. The more she uncovers about Bitsy, the more she questions everything she thought she knew―and soon, others begin questioning her sanity. But is Lulu truly losing her mind? Or is she on the verge of discovering a reality too terrifying to accept? In the vein of The Bell Jar and The Hours, The Mad Wife weaves domestic drama with psychological suspense, so poignant and immersive, you won't want to put it down.

A new creation by the author of Severance, the stories in Bliss Montage crash through our carefully built mirages What happens when fantasy tears through the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end? In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. From a woman who lives in a house with all of her ex-boyfriends, to a toxic friendship built around a drug that makes you invisible, to an ancient ritual that might heal you of anything if you bury yourself alive, these and other scenarios reveal that the outlandish and the everyday are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly similar.

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers? A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.

A new creation by the author of Severance, the stories in Bliss Montage crash through our carefully built mirages What happens when fantasy tears through the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end? In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. From a woman who lives in a house with all of her ex-boyfriends, to a toxic friendship built around a drug that makes you invisible, to an ancient ritual that might heal you of anything if you bury yourself alive, these and other scenarios reveal that the outlandish and the everyday are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly similar.

A fascinating, revelatory memoir revealing the author’s struggle to come to terms with her own sociopathy and shed light on the often maligned and misunderstood mental disorder. Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected it was because she didn’t feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn’t like the way that “nothing” felt. She did her best to pretend she was like everyone else, but the constant pressure to conform to a society she knew rejected anyone like her was unbearable. So Patric stole. She lied. She was occasionally violent. She became an expert lock-picker and home-invader. All with the goal of replacing the nothingness with...something. In college, Patric finally confirmed what she’d long suspected. She was a sociopath. But even though it was the very first personality disorder identified—well over 200 years ago—sociopathy had been neglected by mental health professionals for decades. She was told there was no treatment, no hope for a normal life. She found herself haunted by sociopaths in pop culture, madmen and evil villains who are considered monsters. Her future looked grim. But when Patric reconnects with an old flame, she gets a glimpse of a future beyond her diagnosis. If she’s capable of love, it must mean that she isn’t a monster. With the help of her sweetheart (and some curious characters she meets along the way) she embarks on a mission to prove that the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren’t all monsters either. This is the inspiring story of her journey to change her fate and how she managed to build a life full of love and hope.

An unforgettable epic saga of a French noblewoman deserted on an island where her survival will depend on the power of her faith and love—from the New York Times bestselling author of Sam.Heir to a chateau with its own village and lands, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and Jean Francois de la Rocque de Roberval—an enigmatic and volatile older man Marguerite has never met—becomes her guardian, controlling her future. He sells her property to pay his debts, leaving her destitute, and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends Roberval’s servant and the two begin meeting secretly aboard the ship, drawn together by an intense attraction. But when Roberval discovers Marguerite’s deception, his rage is all-consuming. As punishment, he maroons her and her lover on a small island, condemning them to certain death.Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite is now at the mercy of the elements. Without food or shelter, she must learn to hunt and live in a cave. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, survival becomes nearly impossible. Marguerite despairs; has everyone and everything she once held dear abandoned her?A riveting portrait inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, and a gorgeous celebration of the power of the natural world, Isola is the timeless story of a woman realizing her true strength.

Could you survive on your own in the wild, with every one out to make sure you don't live to see the morning? In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before—and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weight survival against humanity and life against love.

The Virgin Suicides meets I Have Some Questions For You in a dual timeline suspense following one woman as she begins to uncover the truth of the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath adoring sad girls they attended college with decades ago, all while holding a secret that will slowly unravel her new, suburban dream life. Some stories refuse to stay buried. For best friends Nikki and Sadie, college was supposed to be a fresh start, a way to blast Courtney Love from car speakers and leave their youth behind. But along with sadness-obsessed girls and intrusive professors, a dark story plagues their small all-women’s school: the Sylvia Club, a campus legend surrounding the deaths of multiple Sylvia Plath-adoring students, all written off as suicides. Aspiring writer Nikki finds herself drawn to the tragic tales, so much so that dead girls begin to haunt her dark imagination. As she digs deeper, Nikki soon suspects there's much more to the story - a suspicion that will lead to a tragedy of its own, one that will tear her and Sadie apart. It’s been nearly twenty years since Sadie last saw her estranged friend. Now, Nikki is dead, and when Sadie ends up pregnant by Nikki’s grieving husband not long after the funeral, she finds herself stepping into her ex-best friend’s seemingly perfect life. But the longer Sadie lives in Nikki’s eerily preserved home, the more she sees her appear and soon, she’s convinced that Nikki is sending her clues from beyond the grave. Because it seems Nikki never stopped looking for answers about what happened to the girls of the Sylvia Club, and she may have been its latest victim. Told in a dual timeline, Doll Parts is an evocative and irresistible debut, at once an exploration of the dark chasms that break apart friendships, an ode to the aching beauty of girlhood, and a sharp portrayal of grief that can physically haunt you.

Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman. Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfil her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.