Coming of Age

“Climb up here, Little Alien. Sit next to me. I will tell you about life on this planet. I will tell you how it goes.” Before she thinks of herself as Little Alien, our narrator is only a lonely little girl living in southeast England, who doesn’t understand the world the way other children seem to. So when a late-night TV special introduces her to the mysterious Voynich Manuscript—an ancient tome written in an indecipherable language—Little Alien experiences something she hasn’t before: hope. Could there be others like her, who also feel like they’re from another planet?

In eight interconnected, finely wrought stories, Margaret Laurence recreates the world of Vanessa MacLeod–a world of scrub-oak, willow, and chokecherry bushes; of family love and conflict; and of a girl’s growing awareness of and passage into womanhood. The stories blend into one masterly and moving whole: poignant, compassionate, and profound in emotional impact.

The only love Ari has known is Morgan. Engaged and planning a life with him in New York, Ari is shocked when Morgan sits her down one rainy afternoon and tells her their decade-long relationship is over. They’ve been over for a long time now, he says—and Ari knows he’s right.

On an ordinary day in an upscale Atlanta suburb, Maya is making breakfast for her two sons, when her husband drops a red-and-blue striped envelope on the counter and asks a devastating question: Who is Sunny? Maya is sent reeling back to her childhood in Guyana—a time when Sunny was her only name. Unbeknownst to her husband, Maya is not who she claims to be. The letter, from her long-lost sister Roshi, now threatens to expose her true identity and shatter the seemingly perfect existence Maya worked so hard to build.

DESPRE AUDIOBOOK. Autoare distinsă cu Premiul Pulitzer pentru Ficțiune în 2023. Bestseller New York Times. Într-un orășel din America zilelor noastre, Willa Knox și familia ei se luptă cu o precaritate dezarmantă: sărăcie, șomaj, doliu, boală și lipsa oricărei siguranțe materiale – crize personale care se profilează pe fundalul unei și mai amenințătoare crize globale. În același oraș, dar în 1874, sosește Thatcher Greenwood.

In the fall of 1959, Freda Gilroy arrives on the campus of Fisk University full of hope, carrying a suitcase and the voice of her father telling her she’s part of a family legacy of greatness. Soon, the ugliness of the Jim Crow South intrudes, and she’s thrust into a movement for social change. Freda is reluctant to get involved, torn between a soon-to-be doctor her parents approve of and an audacious young man willing to risk it all in the name of justice.

It's 1967 in Montreal, the Expo is in full swing, and Audrey Parker has just moved with her dad to Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a whole new neighbourhood full of different kinds of people to spy on. Audrey is a lot of things: articulate, disarming, forthright. And, as her father reminds her often, indecently nosy. Audrey scribbles every observation down in her notebooks—from which foods her new teacher eats for lunch, to how blue the water is in Greece, to what time the one-legged man across the street gets home. She is certain she will soon root out a murderer or uncover a mystery.

When June Marlow was arrested for the murder of her husband nearly thirty years ago, she feared she would never see her daughters again. Terrorised by the man who claimed to love her, and too ashamed and humiliated to admit to years of abuse, June was found guilty, despite her claim that she’d acted in self-defence. Now as June’s release date nears, she’s excited to be reunited with her girls. But the little girls she left behind are now grown up, and while Lu is desperate for June’s homecoming, longing to feel her mother’s arms around her once again, her sister, Cole feels differently.

Maya and Natasha are twin sisters born in the midst of the Siege of Leningrad in 1941 and immediately abandoned by their mother, a prima ballerina at the Kirov Ballet who would rather die than not dance. Taken in by their mother’s best friend at the Kirov, the girls are raised to be dancers themselves. The Vaganova Ballet Academy—and the totalitarian Soviet regime—is the only world they know. In 1958, now seniors at the Vaganova at the height of the Cold War, all Maya and Natasha and their classmates want is to dance with the Kirov, and to join the company on its tour to America next year.

DESPRE AUDIOBOOK. Câștigătoare Women's Prize for Fiction 2022. Massachusetts Book Award. BC and Yukon Book Prize. Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction. După...

Andi Glover loves nothing more than a good book. Any book in fact because when you’re raised by unconventional parents who think school’s for squares, fiction is eminently preferable to reality. The only problem is that fiction isn’t the best way to learn about the real world. When Andi starts her new live-in job at Templewood Hall for the eccentric Lady Dawe and her enigmatic son Hugo, it’s tempting to think she’s fallen into the pages of one of her favourite gothic novels. But the plot twists at Templewood Hall are stranger than fiction.

Long before Oliver Twist stumbled onto the scene, Jacob Fagin was scratching out a life for himself in the dark alleys of nineteenth-century London. Born in the Jewish enclave of Stepney shortly after his father was executed as a thief, Jacob's whole world is his open-minded mother, Leah. But Jacob’s prospects are forever altered when a light-fingered pickpocket takes Jacob under his wing and teaches him a trade that pays far better than the neighborhood boys could possibly dream.

On Stenland, there comes a time known as skeld season: one day, any woman on the island can wake with three black lines on her forehead, the mark of a skeld. Skeld season comes around without warning, and while each window of time lasts only three months, anyone a skeld turns to stone is very much dead. That's how Tess’s mother killed Soren’s parents. Maybe for this reason alone, Tess and Soren should not have fallen in love. Since the time her mother was a skeld, Tess has wanted to leave Stenland, to run from the windswept island, from her family and friends

Rachael Carmichael was a global movie star, living in a glamorous world of red carpets, money, awards—and a high-profile wedding to director Greg Foster. So why did she become a total recluse when they divorced? Aspiring actress Harley Roth is desperate to be as famous as her aunt Rachael. But even with her industry connections, she’s still stuck on the outside, waiting for her big break.

A romance about a storm that separates a family.

First times, fast times, past times...Boston, 1975. Nicky DeMarco, a naïve but game 18-year-old, is navigating his first semester of college when he falls into a surprising—and life-altering—romantic triangle with Joe, a charismatic, big-hearted jock, and Lori, a warm and adventurous psych student. The three embark on a secret, joyous, and passionate journey of self-discovery as Nicky questions his sexuality—and all that entails.

1979. Fifteen-year-old Aurora Taylor’s single mother prefers to leave when things get hard. She’s spent years abandoning bad boyfriends and dead-end jobs, without so much as a glance in the rearview mirror. After fifteen years in the passenger seat, Aurora needs more than two hands to count the towns she’s lived in. She’s learned to live small—it’s easier to leave when you don’t need to say goodbye. So when her mother, Laine, shows up at school with the car loaded, Aurora assumes her latest fling has run its course. Instead, it’s her grandpa Jay’s death calling them back.

Headlights probe the fabric of evening as the V8’s purr and the tires grind upon the pavement. The signal clicks and flashes in rhythm to the beat on the radio. Spin the wheel, and slip through the parking lot. Wave at friends sprawled across their chariots, arms draped around other equally lonely misfits. Emptiness lures them to sit under neon lights, staring into faces profiled in shadow, touching lips and caressing with light fingertips.

Since his beloved wife Helen passed, Luke and six-year-old Amy are just about keeping the show on the road, but he’d do anything to have Helen near him again. Connie’s much-missed mum was everything to her daughter. A friend, a cheer-leader, a comfort, and the best housemate Connie ever had. What she wouldn’t give to speak to her one more time… Teenage twins Alex and Lucy both miss their dad desperately but neither have the words to put it right. In the heart of Dublin, a quiet community is forming, drawn together by the loved ones they have lost, but kept together by friendship and laughter.

Seattle, 2015. Emily Reed refuses to dwell on her emotions. When the first-year attorney is assigned a church archival project, she dives into the records to hide from her own heartache. But when she discovers her parents were married in this very chapel, she is forced to confront the grief she buried a decade ago.

A coming-of-age novel that is as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, There’s No Turning Back centers on eight women with radically different backgrounds who attend the same college in Rome. Some are there to study, others to escape a scandal, or keep a secret, and during their time there, they experience the challenges of love, work, and emancipation.

Clare is supposed to be the grown-up one. Married to the love of her life, with a major deal for her first novel, she has everything she thought she wanted. So then why does it all feel so wrong? When she agrees to a weeklong vacation in Hawai'i with five of her oldest friends as they each approach thirty, she is hoping for an escape with the people who know her best. But when a terrifying news alert shatters their peace, it becomes harder to ignore how much the world has changed since they were teenagers.

The bridge at Sagamore was closed when we got there that summer of 1956. We had to cross the canal at Buzzards Bay over the only other roadway that tethered Cape Cod to the mainland. Thus twelve-year-old Lily Grainger, while safe from 'communists and the Pope,' finds her family suddenly adrift. That was the summer the Andrea Doria sank, pilot whales stranded, and Lily's father built a house he couldn't afford.

In the shadow of an ancient abbey nestled between rivers, Daniel is growing up. He is highly intelligent but little understood by his parents, and a secret passion burns inside him for love and recognition. When his father loses his job as the headmaster of the local school, his family stumbles into a rural life for which they are ill-prepared. Daniel’s sole solace is the arrival of Philip, a new boy at school, whom he worships with a confused intensity.

COUNTERPUNCH – Maryl Morgan Marks jumps into the gritty pounding city of Philadelphia after a chance meeting leads her to a booming high-tech startup job far from her sleepy Seattle suburb. There she is shocked into the reality of power, greed, and start-up speed in the high-stakes world of the 1980s. Grappling with an inherited friend group, dubious business ethics, and the new definition of corporate success, her journey is a tug-of-war between her higher self and wanting retribution for the misogyny and narcissism engulfing her.