List Builder

2yr

Posted about a book

New releases this week

This week, we’re excited to read new books by Tommy Orange and Sloane Crosley, new works of speculative fiction, a Booker Prize finalist, and more. What are you reading this week? Let us know in the comments! “Wandering Stars” by Tommy Orange: Tommy Orange’s latest is one of our most anticipated reads of the year. The Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller “There There” delivers a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous. “The Other Valley” by Scott Alexander Howard: This book is being marketed as for fans of “Never Let Me Go” and “The Giver,” so you know we’re excited about it. “The Other Valley” is an elegant and exhilarating literary speculative novel about an isolated town neighbored by its own past and future, and a young girl who spots two elderly visitors from across the border: the grieving parents of the boy she loves. “Grief is for People” by Sloane Crosley: How do we live without the ones we love? “Grief Is for People” is a deeply moving and suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss that is profuse with life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in philosophy and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief. “Whiskey Tender” by Deborah Taffa: “Whiskey Tender” traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. “Fathomfolk” by Eliza Chan: Revolution is brewing in the semi-submerged city of Tiankawi, between humans and the fathomfolk who live in its waters. This gloriously imaginative debut fantasy, inspired by East Asian mythology and ocean folk tales, is a novel of magic, rebellion and change. In the semi-flooded city, humans are, quite literally, on top: peering down from shining towers and aerial walkways on the fathomfolk - sirens, seawitches, kelpies and kappas - who live in the polluted waters below. Half-siren Mira works as a border guard, and must decide how to help the downtrodden people below. “The Partner Plot” by Kristina Forest: Two former high school sweethearts get a second chance in this marriage of convenience romance by Kristina Forest. When the two exes randomly run into each other in Vegas, they wake up with quite the hangover—and wedding rings on their fingers. Their impulsive nuptials might be a blessing in disguise, though, when they realize that both of their careers could benefit from the marriage. So they play the part of a blissfully wedded couple. Yet when their passion comes hurling back, they realize their feelings are just as real as they were back when they were teens. But are their lives too different to stick it through or will they finally get a happy ending? “Hope Ablaze” by Sarah Mughal Rana: “All My Rage” meets “The Poet X” in this electric debut that explores a Muslim teen finding her voice in a post-9/11 America. When Nida is illegally frisked at a Democratic Senatorial candidate’s political rally, she writes a scathing poem about the politician, never expecting the letter to go viral weeks before Election Day. In the aftermath of her poem, Nida struggles to balance the expectations of her mother, her uncle, and her vibrant Muslim community with the person she truly wants to be. With a touch of magic and poetry sprinkled throughout, Sarah Mughal Rana's “Hope Ablaze” is heartbreaking, often funny, and ultimately uplifting, not only celebrating the Islamic faith and Pakistani culture, but simultaneously confronting racism and Islamophobia with unflinching bravery. “The American Daughters” by Maurice Carlos Ruffin: Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days dreaming of a loving future and reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends, and who introduces her to a group called the Daughters. “The American Daughters” is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom. “In Ascension” by Martin MacInnes: Longlisted for last year’s Booker Prize, this is an astonishing novel about a young microbiologist investigating an unfathomable deep vent in the ocean floor, leading her on a journey that will encompass the full trajectory of the cosmos and the passage of a single human life. Exploring the natural world with the wonder and reverence we usually reserve for the stars, In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how - no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope - we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.