The weekly new and noteworthy books listed here on our website is a short list of new arrivals to our bookshelves in the past few weeks. However, there are plenty more exciting new releases we don't want you to miss out on. Here's suggestions for you to check out that are getting some attention:
A timely novel that captures the agonizing divide between Black and white communities, offering a gritty look at motherhood in contemporary America and the never-ending quest to achieve the American Dream.
At a time when more people than ever are on the edge of homelessness, this novel is an eye-opener into that population. Whether we refer to the homeless and drug abuse culture of the Haight of the 1960's while reading this book, or to the current day culture of homelessness, the novel is timeless. The story follows a 20-year old homeless young woman and the "family" she creates on the streets of San Francisco and in Golden Gate Park. Against the backdrop of a radically changing San Francisco, a city which embraces a booming tech economy while struggling to maintain its culture of tolerance, "At the Edge of the Haight" follows the lives of those who depend on makeshift homes and communities.
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On the night of February 6, 1978, an overwhelming nor'easter struck the city of New York. On that night, in a penthouse apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the stately Apelles building, a crowd gathered for a grand party. And on that night Mr. Albert Haynes Caldwell, a successful retired attorney, hatched a plan to fake a medical emergency and toss himself into the Hudson River, where he would drown. This is the story of that night.
Number-one bestselling author of "The Nightingale" and "The Great Alone" Kristin Hannah's newest novel, set during the Great Depression, is an epic about love, heroism, hope, and survival. The novel defly captures the horrors of the ceaseless Dust Storms in the Great Plains in the 1930's, and the tragedy of a time in America when millions were out of work and when the land seemed to have turned against them.
Immersed in Cherokee myths and history, this novel draws on Cherokee folklore as a family reckons with loss and injustice around the tragic death of their son. The family's journey home and their struggle for reason unearths the deep reverberations of trauma, creating a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.
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A perceptively intimate portrayal of linked lives — across race and class — that takes place in a culturally changing Barbados resort town, Baxter's Beach. As the Barbados aristrocracy manipulate their servants with velvet gloves and steel nerves, this debut novel exposes fault lines of resentment and love being as ephemeral as a tropical breeze.
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A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.
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A tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family, and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for—and everything she feared. Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother that she herself never had. But in the thick of motherhood's exhausting early days, she becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter and that she doesn't behave like most children do.
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As World War II intrudes upon their home, three young friends risk everything for freedom, love, and a chance at a better life in this untold true story of how Greece helped the Allies to win the war. This remarkable tale pays tribute to the brave men and women who fought and gave everything for their country, for each other, and for freedom. It is an epic story of courage, survival, sacrifice, the strength of the human spirit, and of a love and friendship that echos across time and generations.
Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each of these short stories delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another.
A poetic journey into the mind and heart of a musical genius, Ruth Padel's new sequence of poems, in four movements, is a personal voyage through the life and legend of one of the world's greatest composers. She uncovers the man behind the music, charting his private thoughts and feelings through letters, diaries, sketchbooks, and the conversation books he used as his hearing declined. She gives us Beethoven as a battered four-year-old, weeping at the clavier; the young virtuoso pianist agonized by his encroaching deafness; the passionate, heartbroken lover; the clumsy eccentric making coffee with exactly sixty beans. Padel's book is a poet and string player's intimate connection across the centuries with an artist who, though increasingly isolated, ended even his most harrowing works on a note of hope.
Twelve essays from 1968 to 2000 that have never before gathered together offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of the legendary figure Joan Didion. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and remarkably shrewd.
“Make no mistake about it: "Walking with Ghosts" is a masterpiece. A book that will wring out our tired hearts. It is by turns poetic, moving, and very funny. You will find it on the shelf alongside other great Irish memoirs including those by Frank McCourt, Nuala O'Faolain and Edna O’Brien.” —Colum McCann
Just two days after this book’s publication, Tyson died at the age of 96. With an actor’s precise timing, her work seemed finally done. “Just as I Am” was a long time coming: most memoirists don’t wait until their 90s, but Tyson knew the power of a long pause before a curtain goes up. “Here in my ninth decade,” she writes, “I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say.”
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Archivist and writer Danielle Geller uses pieces of her mother’s life that were packed into eight suitcases in an attempt to understand her mother’s relationship to home, and their shared need to leave it. She retraces her mother's life, where she confronts her family's history and the decisions that she herself had been forced to make while growing up, a journey that will end at her mother's home: the Navajo reservation.
Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic, and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation she increasingly felt as she grew older. This memoir from black cultural critic Rebecca Carroll recounts her painful struggle to overcome a completely white childhood in order to forge her identity as a black woman in America.
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The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles, this searing memoir adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story.
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Claiming to be acting in the best interests of all, the adoption business was founded on secrecy and lies. "American Baby" details how a lucrative and exploitative industry removed children from their birth mothers and placed them with hopeful families, fabricating stories about infants' origins and destinations, then closing the door firmly between the parties forever. Told through the bittersweet story of one teenager, the son she was forced to relinquish, and their search to find each other, this book reveals he shocking truth about postwar adoption in America.
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Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Abandoned at the age of two by her Armenian American mother and losing her Ghanaian father when she was thirteen, her life was an enormous struggle. This memoir is how she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking.
Part hidden history, part love letter to creative innovation, this is the true story of an unlikely friendship between a dancer, Loie Fuller, and a scientist, Marie Curie, who were brought together by an illuminating discovery. Loie Fuller was an American performance artist living in Paris at the turn of the century who became a living symbol of the Art Nouveau movement with her hypnotic dances and stunning theatrical effects. She heard about Marie Curie's discovery of a glowing blue element and dreamed of using it to dazzle audiences on stage. While Loie's dream wouldn't be realized, her connection with Marie and their shared fascination with radium endured.
Brilliantly argued, expertly researched, and filled with compelling stories, "Chatter" gives us the power to change the most important conversation we have each day: the one we have with ourselves. Psychologist Ethan Kross explores the silent conversations we have with ourselves, interweaving groundbreaking behavioral and brain research from his own lab with real-world case studies and explaining how these conversations shape our lives, work, and relationships.
"Think Again" reveals that we don't have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It's an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom.
The Flint, Michigan sit-down strike of 1936-1937 was the birth of the United Auto Workers, setting the standard for wages in every industry. This is the riveting story of how workers defeated the largest industrial corporation in the world, General Motors. The workers victory ushered in the golden age of the American middle class and created a new kind of America, in which every worker had a right to a share of the company's wealth.