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Featured Guide

Emiko Jean, author of Mika in Real Life

At 35, Mika Suzuki is at the lowest point of her life when she receives a phone call from Penny, the daughter she placed for adoption 16 years ago. Penny is determined to forge a relationship with her birth mother; in turn, Mika longs to be someone Penny is proud of. Faced with her own inadequacies, Mika embellishes a fact about her life. What starts as a tiny white lie slowly snowballs into a fully fledged fake life. The harder-won heart belongs to Thomas Calvin, Penny’s adoptive widower father. What starts as a rocky, contentious relationship slowly blossoms into a friendship and, over time, something more. But can Mika really have it all --- love, her daughter, the life she’s always wanted --- or will her deceptions ultimately catch up to her?

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Anthony Marra, author of Mercury Pictures Presents

Born in Rome, Maria Lagana immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest. Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across LA, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate --- and her own.

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Lisa Jewell, author of The Family Remains

DCI Samuel Owusu is called to the scene of a gruesome discovery and learns the bones are connected to a cold case that left three people dead 30 years ago. Rachel Rimmer’s husband, Michael, has been found dead in his cellar. The French police need Rachel to answer questions about Michael and his past that she very much doesn’t want to answer. After fleeing London 30 years ago in the wake of a horrific tragedy, Lucy Lamb is coming home. While she settles in with her children and is just about to purchase their first-ever house, her brother takes off to find the boy from their shared past whose memory haunts their present. As they all race to discover answers to these convoluted mysteries, they will come to find that they’re connected in ways they never could have imagined.

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Jamie Ford, author of The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

Dorothy Moy breaks her own heart for a living. As Washington’s former poet laureate, that’s how she describes channeling her dissociative episodes and mental health struggles into her art. But when her five-year-old daughter exhibits similar behavior and begins remembering things from the lives of their ancestors, Dorothy believes the past has truly come to haunt her. Through an experimental treatment designed to mitigate inherited trauma, Dorothy intimately connects with past generations of women in her family.

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Sara Nisha Adams, author of The Reading List

Widower Mukesh lives a quiet life after losing his beloved wife. Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library for the summer when she discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. It’s a list of novels that she’s never heard of before. Intrigued, and a little bored with her slow job at the checkout desk, she impulsively decides to read every book on the list, one after the other. As each story gives up its magic, the books transport Aleisha from the painful realities she’s facing at home. When Mukesh arrives at the library, desperate to forge a connection with his bookworm granddaughter, Aleisha passes along the reading list…hoping that it will be a lifeline for him too.

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Belinda Huijuan Tang, author of A Map for the Missing

Tang Yitian has been living in America for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China. Though they have been estranged for years, Yitian promises to come home. When Yitian attempts to piece together what may have happened, he struggles to navigate China’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an outsider, and his mother’s evasiveness only deepens the mystery. So he seeks out a childhood friend who may be in a position to help: Tian Hanwen. Reuniting for the first time as adults, Yitian and Hanwen embark on the search for Yitian’s father, all the while grappling with the past --- who Yitian’s father really was, and what might have been.

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Megan Miranda, author of The Last to Vanish

Ten years ago, Abigail Lovett fell into a job she loves, managing The Passage Inn, a cozy, upscale resort nestled in the North Carolina mountain town of Cutter’s Pass. Cutter’s Pass is best known for its outdoor offerings and mysterious history. As the book begins, the string of unsolved disappearances that has haunted the town is once again thrust into the spotlight when journalist Landon West, who was staying at the inn to investigate the story of the vanishing trail, disappears himself. When she finds incriminating evidence that may bring the community closer to the truth, Abby soon discovers how little she knows about her coworkers, neighbors and even those closest to her.

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Susan Wiggs, author of Sugar and Salt

Jerome “Sugar” Barnes learned the art of baking in his grandma’s bakery, also called Sugar, on historic Perdita Street in San Francisco. He supplies baked goods to the Lost and Found Bookshop across the street. When the restaurant that shares his commercial kitchen loses its longtime tenant, a newcomer moves in: Margot Salton, a barbecue master from Texas. Margot isn’t exactly on the run, but she needs a fresh start. She’s taken care of herself her whole life, and her dream has been to open a restaurant somewhere far, far from Texas. Margot instantly takes to Jerome’s grandmother, the lively, opinionated Ida. The older woman proves to be a good mentor, and Margot is drawn to Jerome. But just as she starts to relax into a happy new future, Margot’s past in Texas comes back to haunt her.

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Sarah Vaughan, author of Reputation

As a politician, Emma has sacrificed a great deal for her career --- including her marriage and her relationship with her daughter, Flora. A former teacher, the glare of the spotlight is unnerving for Emma, particularly when it leads to countless insults, threats and trolling as she tries to work in the public eye. Fourteen-year-old Flora is encountering heartless bullying. When another teenager takes her own life, Emma lobbies for a new law to protect women and girls from the effects of online abuse. Now, Emma and Flora find their personal lives uncomfortably intersected…but then the unthinkable happens. A man is found dead in Emma’s home. A man she had every reason to be afraid of and to want gone.

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Katherine Center, author of The Bodyguard

Hannah Brooks looks more like a kindergarten teacher than somebody who could kill you with a wine bottle opener. Or a ballpoint pen. Or a dinner napkin. But the truth is, she’s an Executive Protection Agent (aka "bodyguard"), and she just got hired to protect superstar actor Jack Stapleton from his middle-aged, corgi-breeding stalker. When Jack’s mom gets sick, he comes home to the family’s Texas ranch to help out. There's only one catch: He doesn’t want his family to know about his stalker. Or the bodyguard thing. And so Hannah --- against her will and her better judgment --- finds herself pretending to be Jack’s girlfriend as a cover. But the more time she spends with Jack, the more real it all starts to seem.

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