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Featured Guide

Shelby Van Pelt, author of Remarkably Bright Creatures

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her 18-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over 30 years ago. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors --- until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova. Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now he must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.

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Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words

Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. One day, a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath their sorting table. Esme rescues the slip, and when she learns that the word means “slave girl,” she begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so, she must venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

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Kim Michele Richardson, author of The Book Woman's Daughter

In the ruggedness of the beautiful Kentucky mountains, Honey Lovett has always known that the old ways can make a hard life harder. As the daughter of the famed blue-skinned, Troublesome Creek packhorse librarian, Honey and her family have been hiding from the law all her life. But when her mother and father are imprisoned, Honey realizes she must fight to stay free, or risk being sent away for good. Picking up her mother's old packhorse library route, Honey begins to deliver books to the remote hollers of Appalachia. Honey is looking to prove that she doesn't need anyone telling her how to survive. But the route can be treacherous, and some folks aren't as keen to let a woman pave her own way.

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Jennifer Weiner, author of The Summer Place

When her 22-year-old stepdaughter announces her engagement to her pandemic boyfriend, Sarah Danhauser is shocked. Headstrong Ruby has already set a date and spoken to her beloved safta, Sarah’s mother Veronica, about having the wedding at the family’s beach house in Cape Cod. Veronica is thrilled to be bringing the family together one last time before putting the big house on the market. But when the wedding day arrives, lovers are revealed as their true selves, misunderstandings take on a life of their own, and secrets come to light. There are confrontations and revelations that will touch each member of the extended family, ensuring that nothing will ever be the same.

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Betsy Prioleau, author of Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in New York City’s Gilded Age

For 20 years Miriam Leslie ran the country’s largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, which chronicled postbellum America in dozens of weeklies and monthlies. A pioneer in an all-male industry, she made a fortune and became a national celebrity and tastemaker in the process. But she also flouted feminine convention, took lovers, married four times, and harbored unsavory secrets that she concealed through a skein of lies and multiple personas. DIAMONDS AND DEADLINES reveals the unknown, sensational life of the brilliant and brazen “empress of journalism,” who dropped a bombshell at her death: She left her entire multimillion-dollar estate to women’s suffrage --- a never-equaled amount that guaranteed passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

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Karen White, author of The Shop on Royal Street

Nola Trenholm is looking to begin her life anew in New Orleans. But the historic fixer-upper she buys comes with even more work than she anticipated when the house’s previous occupants don’t seem to be ready to depart. Although she can’t communicate with ghosts like her stepmother can, luckily Nola knows someone in New Orleans who is able to --- even if he’s the last person on earth she wants anything to do with ever again. Beau Ryan comes with his own dark past --- a past that involves the disappearance of his sister and parents during Hurricane Katrina --- and he’s connected to the unsolved murder of a woman who once lived in the old Creole cottage Nola is determined to make her own...whether the resident restless spirits agree or not.

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Adriana Trigiani, author of The Good Left Undone

In the halcyon days of the past, Domenica Cabrelli thrives in the coastal town of Viareggio until the day her beloved home becomes unsafe as Italy teeters on the brink of World War II. As her journey takes her from the rocky shores of Marseille to the mystical beauty of Scotland to the dangers of wartime Liverpool --- where Italian Scots were imprisoned without cause --- Domenica experiences love, loss and grief as she longs for home. A hundred years later, her daughter, Matelda, and her great-granddaughter, Anina, face the same big questions about life and their family’s legacy as Matelda contemplates what is worth fighting for, and when to let go. The Cabrellis have survived so much, and it is only through the transformative power of love that they can hope to truly heal.

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Emily St. John Mandel, author of Sea of Tranquility

Edwin St. Andrew is 18 years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the Canadian wilderness and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal. Two centuries later, Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended.

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Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House

Bix Bouton’s company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is desperate for a new idea when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. It’s 2010. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious” --- which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others --- has seduced multitudes. But not everyone. In THE CANDY HOUSE, Jennifer Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades.

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Lisa Scottoline, author of What Happened to the Bennetts

Jason Bennett is driving his family home after his daughter’s field hockey game when a pickup truck begins tailgating them. Suddenly two men jump from the pickup and pull guns on Jason, demanding the car. A horrific flash of violence changes his life forever. Later that awful night, Jason and his family receive a visit from the FBI. The carjackers were members of a dangerous drug-trafficking organization, and now Jason and his family are in their crosshairs. The agents advise them to enter the witness protection program, and they have no choice but to agree. The Bennetts begin to fall apart at the seams. Then Jason learns a shocking truth and realizes that he has to take matters into his own hands.

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