Strong Inside is the untold story of Perry Wallace, who in 1966 enrolled at Vanderbilt University and became the first African-American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference. Strong Inside is not just the story of a trailblazing athlete, but of civil rights, race in America, a campus in transition during the tumultuous 1960s, the mental toll of pioneering, decades of ostracism, and eventual reconciliation and healing.
This fast-paced, richly detailed and meticulously researched biography digs deep beneath the surface to reveal a more complicated, illuminating and rewarding story of sports pioneering than we’ve come to expect from the genre.
read more
A previously unpublished novel by a literary master, Skylight tells the intertwined stories of the residents of a faded apartment building in 1940s Lisbon.
Silvestre and Mariana, a happily married elderly couple, take in a young nomad, Abel, and soon discover their many differences. Adriana loves Beethoven more than any man, but her budding sexuality brings new feelings to the surface. Carmen left Galicia to marry humble Emilio, but hates Lisbon and longs for her first love, Manolo. Lidia used to work the streets, but now she’s kept by Paulo, a wealthy man with a wandering eye.
read more
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
John James Audubon is renowned for his masterpiece of natural history and art, The Birds of America, the first nearly comprehensive survey of birdlife focused on this continent. And yet few people understand, and many assume incorrectly, what sort of man he was. How did the illegitimate son of a French sea captain living in Haiti, who lied both about his parentage and his training, rise to become one of the greatest natural historians ever and the greatest name in ornithology?
In Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America—a Pulitzer Prize finalist—William Souder (The Plague of Frogs and On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson,
read more
Winner of the CAL Scribe Fiction Prize
Debut novelist Lesley Jørgensen delivers a rich, funny delight of a novel in which the “marriage plot” is on dazzling display. But as scandals, secrets, culture clashes, and misunderstandings abound—how will anyone find time for love?
Mrs. Begum is the doting, anxious mother of three grown children—Tariq, an art curator with a secret he’s not quite ready to share with his parents; her baby, Shunduri, the pampered princess of the family; and her daughter Rohimum, who has returned home to rural England in shame. Mrs. Begum is determined to marry them off,
read more
Mermaids, kidnappers, and mercenaries hijack a tropical vacation in this genre-bending sendup of the American honeymoon.
On the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, newlyweds Deb and Chip—our opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband who's friendly to a fault—meet a marine biologist who says she's sighted mermaids in a coral reef.
As the resort's “parent company” swoops in to corner the market on mythological creatures, the couple joins forces with other adventurous souls, including an ex–Navy SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ, to save said mermaids from the “Venture of Marvels,”
read more
A Publishers Weekly 2014 Best Summer Book
Almost everyone in town blames eight-year-old Violet Morgan for the death of her nine-year-old sister, Daisy. Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night opens on September 4, 1913, two months after the Fourth of July tragedy. Owen, the girls’ father, “turns to drink” and abandons his family. Their mother Grace falls victim to the seductive powers of Grief, an imagined figure who has seduced her off-and-on since childhood. Violet forms an unlikely friendship with Stanley Adamski, a motherless outcast who works in the mines as a breaker boy.
read more
