In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures

Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect makeshift barricades, splitting the city into ethnic enclaves. Each morning, the people who live there—whether Muslim, Croat, or Serb—push the barriers aside. When violence erupts and becomes, finally, unavoidable, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety in England. She stays behind, reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a few weeks. As the city falls under siege, everything she loves about her home is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops.

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world.

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis trilogy ten years ago, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story. Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research.

Teetapur, an unassuming village just a few hours outside of bustling Delhi, is famous for nothing—until one of its children, eight-year-old Munia, is found dead, hanging from the branch of a Jamun tree. In the largely Hindu village, suspicion quickly falls on an itinerant Muslim man, Mansoor. Suspicion ignites like wildfire, fueled by religious tensions that simmer beneath the surface.

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.

In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the earth, and my mother. These are all crucial forces within the lives of the Indigenous families that animate this groundbreaking book: an astonishing verse novel that chronicles a hundred years of change: a book that will one day stand alongside Halldór Laxness’s Independent People and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter as an essential Scandinavian epic.

Sylvia Knight is losing hope that the person who killed her husband will ever face justice. Since the night of the hit-and-run, her world has been shrouded in hazy darkness—until she meets Theo St. John, the discoverer of a rare comet soon to be visible to the naked eye. As the comet begins to brighten, Sylvia wonders what the apparition might signify. She is soon drawn into the orbit of local mystic Joseph Evans, who believes the comet’s arrival is nothing short of a divine message.

While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator focuses on the color white to creatively channel her inner pain. Through lyrical, interconnected stories, she grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, attempting to make sense of her older sister’s death using the color white. From trying to imagine her mother’s first time producing breast milk to watching the snow fall and meditating on the impermanence of life, she weaves a poignant, heartfelt story of the omnipresence of grief and the ways we perceive the world around us.

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother.

At age nineteen, young Eton graduate Eric Blair set sail for India, dreading the assignment ahead. Along with several other young conscripts, he would be trained for three years as a servant of the British Empire, overseeing the local policemen in Burma. Navigating the social, racial, and class politics of his fellow British at the same time as he learned the local languages and struggled to control his men would prove difficult enough. But doing all of this while grappling with his own self-worth, his sense that he was not cut out for this, is soon overwhelming for the young Blair.

Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation.

When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return in two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister and heads west.

In this “jewel of a novel” (The Observer), Hilary Byrd flees his demons and the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in England for a former British hill station in south India. Charmed by the foreignness of his new surroundings and by the familiarity of everything the British have left behind, he finds solace in life’s simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where, after a chance meeting, the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla take Hilary under their wing.

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures

Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect makeshift barricades, splitting the city into ethnic enclaves. Each morning, the people who live there—whether Muslim, Croat, or Serb—push the barriers aside. When violence erupts and becomes, finally, unavoidable, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety in England. She stays behind, reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a few weeks. As the city falls under siege, everything she loves about her home is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops.

Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective—she doesn’t, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her “pictures” foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful truth: she may glimpse the future, but she can seldom change it. Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis, visiting Belhaven for the harvest, begins to court her.

Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. “If it keeps me awake,” says Marnie's husband Rob, a farmer, “I'll have to wring its neck.” But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple's future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds—and all the precarity, darkness and hope within them—bleed into one another.

When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she's thrown back to the summer she spent waitressing at his high-end Dublin restaurant when she was a young college student—the plush splendor of the dining rooms, the wild parties after service, the sizzling tension of the kitchens. But Hannah also remembers how the attention from Daniel soon morphed from kindness into something darker. Now the restaurant is shuttered and Daniel tries to understand how his life is now completely out of his control

Set in 1994, The Coast Road tells the story of two women—Izzy Keaveney, a housewife, and Colette Crowley, a poet. Colette has left her husband and sons for a married man in Dublin. When she returns to her home in County Donegal to try to pick up the pieces of her old life, her husband, Shaun, a successful businessman, denies her access to her children.

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world.

Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.

Saba is just a child when he flees the fighting in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with his older brother, Sandro, and father, Irakli, for asylum in England. Two decades later, all three men are struggling to make peace with the past, haunted by the places and people they left behind.

It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue.

In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer - its sunlight and storms - into 22 crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent.