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WALKING ON COWRIE SHELLS

One of our recommended books is Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nkweti

A “boisterous and high-spirited debut” (Kirkus starred review)“that enthralls the reader through their every twist and turn” (Publishers Weekly starred review)

In her powerful debut story collection, Nana Nkweti’s virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” she skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In “The Devil Is a Liar” a pregnant pastor’s wife struggles with the collision of Western Christianity and her mother’s traditional Cameroonian belief system as she worries about her unborn child.

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OLGA DIES DREAMING

One of our recommended books is Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

A blazing talent debuts with the tale of a status-driven wedding planner grappling with her social ambitions, absent mother, and Puerto Rican roots­, all in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

It’s 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro “Prieto” Acevedo, are bold-faced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan’s powerbrokers.

Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1%, but she can’t seem to find her own…until she meets Matteo,

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REELING

One of our recommended books is Reeling by Sarah Stonich

What stage of grief is it when your grandmother’s ghost keeps popping up on your electronic devices? Denial? For RayAnne that seems to be the stage for launching the second season of Fishing!—in New Zealand. Ready or not, she is taking public television’s first all-women fishing talk show on the road, putting the cold Minnesota winter in the rearview mirror—which, it turns out, Gran is haunting, too.

After a challenging first season, and RayAnne’s serendipitous ascension to host, there’s a lot at stake. With camera-wielding twins Rongo and Rangi along as crew and tour guides,

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SAVAGE TONGUES

One of our recommended books is Savage Tongues by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

A new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, “written with the intensity of early Marguerite Duras and Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment,” about a young woman caught in an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, and human connection (The Millions).

It’s summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man.

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THE OPHELIA GIRLS

One of our recommended books is The Ophelia Girls by Jane Healey

A mother’s secret past and her daughter’s present collide in this richly atmospheric novel from the acclaimed author of The Animals at Lockwood Manor.

In the summer of 1973, Ruth and her four friends were obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings—and a little bit obsessed with each other. Drawn to the cold depths of the river by Ruth’s house, the girls pretend to be the drowning Ophelia, with increasingly elaborate tableaus. But by the end of that fateful summer, real tragedy finds them along the banks.

Twenty-four years later, Ruth returns to the suffocating, once grand house she grew up in,

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THE BOOK OF OTTO AND LIAM

One of our recommended books is The Book of Otto and Liam by Paul Griner

Liam is the boy, lying in the hospital, in grave condition, a bullet lodged in his head. Otto is his father, a commercial artist whose marriage has collapsed in the wake of the disaster. Paul Griner’s brave novel taps directly into the vein of a uniquely American tragedy: the school shooting. We know these grotesque and sorrowful events too well. Thankfully, the characters in this drama are finely drawn human beings—those who gain our empathy, those who commit the unspeakable acts, and those conspiracy fanatics who launch a concerted campaign to convince the world that the shooting was a hoax.

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