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THE SEA ELEPHANTS

For fans of Shuggie Bain and A Burning, a queer coming-of-age novel set in 1990s India, about a young man who joins a traveling street theater troupe, seeking to outrun the dark secrets of his past.

Shagun knows he will never be the kind of son his father demands. After the sudden deaths of his beloved twin sisters, Shagun flees his own guilt, his mother’s grief, and his father’s violent disapproval by enrolling at an all-boys boarding school. But he doesn’t find true belonging until he encounters a traveling theater troupe performing the Hindu myths of his childhood.

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THE HOUSE OF DOORS

One of our recommended books is The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

The “masterful” (San Francisco Chronicle) Booker longlisted novel about love and betrayal, colonialism and revolution, storytelling and redemption.

The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert’s, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.

Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings-and the freedom to travel with Gerald.

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HALF A CUP OF SAND AND SKY

Finalist of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for fiction, Half a Cup of Sand and Sky is a moving portrait of one woman’s search for love and belonging cast against a nuanced backdrop of political turmoil.

It is 1977, and the anti-shah protests at Tehran University are intensifying, but Amineh is not like her peers who want a say in the future of their country. Her thoughts are on the beautiful literature of another era and her past of rose harvests and Rumi poetry evenings under the desert sky. A chance encounter with Farzad, an opposition leader and disarmament activist,

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THE BOG WIFE

A “haunting, brilliant” Appalachian folktale evoking the Southern gothic suspense of Sharp Objects and the eco spine-tinglers of Jeff Vandermeer (Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts)

Five siblings in West Virginia unearth long-buried secrets when the supernatural bargain entwining their fate with their ancestral land is suddenly ruptured

Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return,

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THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME

The Most Wonderful Time is a lovable, unexpectedly thought-provoking Christmas romp of a novel from the ever-sparkling pen of Jayne Allen!” — Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Alice Network

The author of the beloved, bestselling Black Girls Must Die Exhausted trilogy returns with an intriguing blend of Such a Fun Age and The Holiday—an irresistible Christmastime novel about heartbreak, hope, love, and the joy that comes from rediscovering oneself.

With Christmas around the corner, Ramona Tucker is desperate to get away. She has been lying to her family about her engagement to Malik,

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THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE

In the vein of the bestselling California noirs of Sue Grafton and Sara Gran, a whodunnit about loyalty, love, and the legacy of trauma featuring a hardboiled, queer private eye whose latest case takes her deep into her own complicated past.

On the cusp of forty, Justine Bailen, better known as Jo, works for an all-female detective agency based in Tucson, Arizona. While staking out a cheating spouse, she learns that her long-estranged best friend from childhood, Rose, is missing, and that Rose’s mother wants to hire Jo to find her. This case is all kinds of wrong for Jo,

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