A Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of the Year
In a voice that shifts from anguished to sarcastic,
heartbroken to hopeful, sixteen-year-old Emily
Shepard recounts her solitary odyssey after the
meltdown of a nuclear power plant near her home
in northern Vermont. Both her parents worked at
the plant: her father as chief engineer, her mother
as head of public relations. Her father had a reputation as a heavy drinker,
In this vibrant new historical novel, the acclaimed
author of The Plum Tree and What She Left Behind
explores one young woman’s determination to put
an end to child labor in a Pennsylvania mining
town…
As a child, Emma Malloy left isolated Coal River,
Pennsylvania, vowing never to return. Now,
orphaned and penniless at nineteen, she accepts a
train ticket from her aunt and uncle and travels back to the rough-hewn
community. Treated like a servant by her relatives,
Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and
doesn’t remember to drink it. She goes to the shops
and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is
unrecognizable—or her daughter, Helen, seems a
total stranger.
But there’s one thing Maud is sure of: her friend
Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells
her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going
on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it.
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
2015 PEN/Hemingway Award, Finalist
A fiercely assured debut novel about four second-generation
Chinese sisters, one of whom happens
to be a boy.
At birth, Peter Huang is given the Chinese name
Juan Chaun, “powerful king.” To his parents, newly
settled in small-town Ontario, he is the exalted
only son in a sea of daughters, the one who will finally fulfill his immigrant
father’s dreams of Western masculinity.
Jim Harrison is a test pilot in the U.S. Air Force,
one of the exalted few. He spends his days cheating
death in the skies above the Mojave Desert and his
nights at his friend Pancho’s bar, often with his wife,
Grace. She and Harrison are secretly desperate for
a child-and when, against all odds, Grace learns
that she is pregnant, the two are overcome with joy.
While America becomes swept up in the fervor of
the Space Race, Harrison turns his attention home,
Man Booker Prize Winner
A Best Books of the Year: The New York Times,
NPR, The Washington Post, The Minneapolis
Star-Tribune, The Economist, The Seattle Times,
Financial Times
August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans
is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young
wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the
Thai-Burma Death Railway,
