Growing up, Lisa Nikolidakis tried to make sense of her childhood, which was scarred by abuse, violence, and psychological terrors so extreme that her relationship with her father was cleaved beyond repair. Having finally been able to leave that relationship behind, surviving meant forgetting. For years, “I’m fine” was a lie Nikolidakis repeated. Then, on her twenty-seventh birthday, Nikolidakis’s father murdered his girlfriend and her daughter, and turned the gun on himself.

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The powerful debut novel from Alan Brennert, Moloka’i tells the story of Rachel Kalama, a seven-year-old Hawaiian girl who contracts leprosy and is quarantined on the island of Moloka’i during the 1890s. Separated from her family and forced to grow up in the leper colony of Kalaupapa, Rachel experiences intense isolation. But she remains strong, finding moments of joy, and even love. Rich in Hawaiian history, this novel proves itself a stellar piece of historical fiction.

Pat Conroy is without doubt America's favorite storyteller, a writer who portrays the anguished truth of the human heart and the painful secrets of families in richly lyrical prose and unforgettable narratives. Now, in Beach Music, he tells of the dark memories that haunt generations, in a story that spans South Carolina and Rome and reaches back into the unutterable terrors of the Holocaust.

A boy and his father walk on the shore of an ocean filled with bloody spears cast off from a war between gods. A father travels back in time over and over, unable to rescue the mother of his child. A mischievous satyr lurking in a dungeon has a field day with trespassing adventurers. These tales and more are in Resurrections, a compilation of short stories written by Chris Philbrook.

In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story.

From renowned journalist Jean Guerrero, here is the haunting story of a daughter’s mission to save her father from his demons and to save herself from destruction. Marco Antonio was raised in Mexico, then migrated to California, where he met Jean’s mother, Jeannette, a Puerto Rican woman just out of med school. Marco is a self-taught genius at building things—including mythologies about himself and the hidden forces that drive us. When he goes on the run, Jean follows and embarks on an investigative journey between cultures and languages, the earthly and the mystical, truth and fiction.

Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision and try to create such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought 20 of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change.

Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The lives of Cherrie and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline.

With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken's award-winning and award-finalist stories.

A poetic portrait of faith, futility, and the joy of this mortal life. In this astoundingly unique audiobook, best-selling author N. D. Wilson reminds each of us that to truly live, we must recognize that we are dying. Every second we create more of our past. Then, we must see the future. We stand in the now. God says create. Live. Choose. Shape the past. Etch your life in stone, and what you make will be forever.

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”: the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds.

Joe Henry was the glue that held his family together. Now, he is dead, and his wife and sons are coming together for one final journey to scatter his ashes. First, however, his loved ones have some things to work out. David, the older son, believes that any minute his life is going to fall apart and everyone he loves will leave him. His brother, Scott, can't shake the belief that at heart, people are inherently rotten. Doris, their mother, just doesn't believe in anything anymore.

These hilarious essays on life inside and outside a Zen monastery make up the spiritual memoir of Shozan Jack Haubner, a Zen monk who didn’t really start out to be one. Raised in a conservative Catholic family, Shozan went on to study philosophy (becoming de-Catholicized in the process) and to pursue a career as a screenwriter and stand-up comic in the clubs of L.A. How he went from life in the fast lane to life on the stationary meditation cushion is the subject of this laugh-out-loud funny account of his experiences.