After Alice Pung’s family fled to Australia from the killing fields of Cambodia, her father chose Alice as her name because he thought their new country was a Wonderland. In this lyrical, bittersweet debut memoir—already an award-winning bestseller when it was published in Australia—Alice grows up straddling two worlds, East and West, her insular family and the Australia outside. With wisdom beyond her years and a keen eye for comedy in everyday life, she writes of the trials of assimilation and cultural misunderstanding, and of the tender but fraught relationships between three generations of women trying to live the Australian dream without losing themselves.
read more
Allie Finkle is excited when a new girl joins her class at Pine Heights Elementary. Now Allie won’t be the new girl anymore! But her excitement turns to dismay when the new girl turns out to be a big bully.
read more
In this poignant, eye-opening and emotionally vivid novel, Mahbod Seraji lays bare the beauty and brutality of the centuries-old Persian culture, while reaffirming the human experiences we all share.
In a middle-class neighborhood of Iran’s sprawling capital city, 17-year-old Pasha Shahed spends the summer of 1973 on his rooftop with his best friend Ahmed, joking around one minute and asking burning questions about life the next. He also hides a secret love for his beautiful neighbor Zari, who has been betrothed since birth to another man. But the bliss of Pasha and Zari’s stolen time together is shattered when Pasha unwittingly acts as a beacon for the Shah’s secret police.
read more
For more than a millennium, her existence has been hidden and denied. But hers is the legend that will not die—Pope Joan, the woman who, disguised as a man, rose to rule Christianity in the ninth century as the one and only woman ever to sit on the Throne of St. Peter.
In this stirring international bestseller, Donna Woolfolk Cross brings the Dark Ages to life in all their brutal splendor, and shares the dramatic story of a woman who struggles against restrictions her soul cannot accept—a woman whose courage makes her a heroine for every age.
read more
Meet Dahlia Finger: twenty-nine, depressed, whip-smart, occasionally affable, bracingly honest, resolutely single, and perennially unemployed. She spends her days stoned in front of the TV, watching the same movies repeatedly, like “a form of prayer.” But when Dahlia’s so-called life is upended by a terminal brain tumor, she must work toward reluctant emotional reckoning with the aid of a questionable self-help guide. Stunned, she obsessively revisits the myriad heartbreaks, disappointments, rages, and regrets that comprise the story of her life. With her take-no-prisoners perspective, her depressive humor, and her extreme vulnerability, Dahlia Finger walks a dazzling line between gravitas and irreverence,
read more
Wally Lamb’s two previous novels, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, struck a chord with readers. They responded to the intensely introspective nature of the books, and to their lively narrative styles and biting humor. One critic called Wally Lamb a “modern-day Dostoyevsky,” whose characters struggle not only with their respective pasts, but with a “mocking, sadistic God” in whom they don’t believe but to whom they turn, nevertheless, in times of trouble (New York Times).
In his new novel, The Hour I First Believed,
read more
