In Kathryn Davis’s second novel, Frances Thorn, waitress and single parent of twins, finds herself transformed by the dazzling magnetism of Helle Ten Brix, an elderly Danish composer of operas. At the heart of what binds them is “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf,” the Hans Christian Andersen tale of a prideful girl who, in order to spare her new shoes, uses the loaf of bread intended as a gift for her parents as a stepping-stone, and ends up sinking to the bottom of a bog. Helle’s final opera, based on this tale and unfinished at the time of her death,
read more
In this blazingly smart and voracious debut, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she’s turning into a dog.
An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay home with her newborn son. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler’s demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck and unusually sharp canines. Her husband, who travels for work, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.
As the mother’s symptoms intensify, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret. Seeking a cure at the library,
read more
Erika Montgomery’s A Summer to Remember is “an unforgettable tale of love, loss and finding your place that glitters as brightly as the golden age of Hollywood.”–Kristy Woodson Harvey, USA Today Bestselling author of Feels Like Falling
For thirty-year-old Frankie Simon, selling movie memorabilia in the shop she opened with her late mother on Hollywood Boulevard is more than just her livelihood—it’s an enduring connection to the only family she has ever known. But when a mysterious package arrives containing a photograph of her mother and famous movie stars Glory Cartwright and her husband at a coastal film festival the year before Frankie’s birth,
read more
In the spirit of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Margaret Kimball’s And Now I Spill the Family Secrets begins in the aftermath of a tragedy.
In 1988, when Kimball is only four years old, her mother attempts suicide on Mother’s Day—and this becomes one of many things Kimball’s family never speaks about. As she searches for answers nearly thirty years later, Kimball embarks on a thrilling visual journey into the secrets her family has kept for decades.
Using old diary entries,
read more
In her third Rainy Lake historical drama, Mary Casanova takes us back to pristine and rugged northern Minnesota. It’s 1922, women have won the right to vote, and Trinity Baird is of age. But at 21, and after nearly two years at Oak Hills Asylum, she returns to her family’s island summer home with her self-confidence in tatters and her mind seared by haunting memories. Her parents are oblivious to what they have put her through and instead watch their daughter for the least sign of defiance. Trinity struggles to be the “respectable” young woman her parents (especially her mother) demand,
read more
In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control.
Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body;
read more
