Books Archive

The First Bad Man

By Miranda July

December 8, 2025

Cheryl Glickman believes in romances that span centuries and a soul that migrates between babies. She works at a women’s self-defense nonprofit and lives alone. When her bosses ask if their twenty-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a while, Cheryl’s eccentrically ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee–the selfish, cruel blond bombshell–who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, leads her to the love of a lifetime.

Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July’s first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic, and important voice today, and a writer for all time.

Telephone

By Percival Everett

December 8, 2025

Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area—the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon—he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches.

After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.

Unsettled Ground

By Claire Fuller

December 8, 2025

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance.

But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother’s secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. This is a thrilling novel of resilience and hope, of love and survival, that explores with dazzling emotional power how the truths closest to us are often hardest to see.

The Bell and the Blade

By Paulina Simons

December 4, 2025

After a mysterious massacre at sea, a ragtag alliance forms in the heart of occupied Belgium.
A handful of Allied soldiers band together with a fearless group of female freedom fighters led by Charlotte Fontaine to carry out a mission no one else can.

The target: unreachable.
The clock: ticking.
The consequences: apocalyptic.

Charlotte: Resolute, hardened by loss – she’ll stop at nothing to save the one she loves.
Fletcher: Sharp as a blade, he never wanted to lead, but now he’s the only one who can finish it.
Louise: Radiant. Innocent. She dreams of peace, but the war won’t let her go.
Rafael: Rebellious, reckless, romantic-and brought to his knees by love.

With time running out, they’re hunted by a brilliant and relentless German officer hellbent on their destruction. In a world on fire, it’s the unbreakable bonds between the unlikely heroes that make all the difference.

From the master storyteller of The Bronze Horseman comes a thrilling, darkly funny, and heartbreaking epic of love, brotherhood, and sacrifice-when every heartbeat could be your last.

Will there ever be another you

By Patricia Lockwood

December 4, 2025

The world might be in disarray, but for one young woman, the very weave of herself seems to have loosened. Time and memories pass straight through her body, she’s afraid of her own floorboards, and the lyrics of ‘What Is Love’ play over and over in her ears. ‘I’m sorry not to respond to your email,’ she writes, ‘but I live completely in the present now.’

Tearing through the slippery terrains of fiction and reality, the possibility for human connection seems to beckon from the other side – and with it, the chance for a blinding re-emergence into the world.

From one of our most original, inventive and prodigiously funny writers, Will There Ever Be Another You is a phosphorescent, wild and profound investigation into what keeps us alive in unprecedented times.

We the Animals

By Justin Torres

December 4, 2025

Three brothers tear their way through childhood – smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from rubbish, hiding when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn – he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white. Barely out of childhood themselves, their love is a serious, dangerous thing.

Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to forge his own way in the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and incredibly powerful.

By Tina Makereti

December 4, 2025

In her first book of nonfiction, prizewinning author Tina Makereti writes from inside her many intersecting lives as a wahine Māori – teacher, daughter, traveller, parent – and into a past that is as alive and changeful as the present moment.

Makereti stands at the foot of her mounga and pays careful attention to tohu. With her tūpuna at her elbow she casts around for home, meets taonga in museums, and writes her way towards her father. She walks through the darkness with others, in awe of Te Kore, Te Pō and Te Ao Mārama—a universe of potential being, dark and light. These are some of the kaupapa that underpin her work and her way of moving through the world, both enlivened and haunted by a compulsion to write.

Included here are frank and moving essays about the wāhine who have shown her many ways of being a Māori woman, the pain and dark humour of living with an alcoholic, a blue boob from breast cancer treatment, and the potential of art to return power to survivors of colonialism. What if we could transform the events that made us who we are? What if there were a way back to the beginning? By turns lyrical, personal and critical, This Compulsion In Us is many things all at once, and an unforgettable portrait of one of Aotearoa’s foremost storytellers.

Gone Before Goodbye

By Reese Witherspoon - Harlan Coben

December 4, 2025

Maggie McCabe is on the brink. A highly skilled and renowned army combat surgeon, she has always lived life at the edge.

But now, after a devastating series of personal tragedies, Maggie is thrown a lifeline by a former colleague, an elite surgeon whose anonymous clientele demand the best care money can buy – as well as absolute discretion.

Halfway across the globe, one of the world’s most mysterious men requires unconventional medical assistance. Desperate, and one of the few surgeons in the world skilled enough to take this job, Maggie enters his realm of unspeakable opulence and fulfils her end of the agreement.

But when the patient suddenly disappears while still under her care, Maggie must become a fugitive herself – or she will be the next one who is . . .

Gone Before Goodbye.

The Bell in the Lake

By Lars Mytting

December 4, 2025

Norway, 1880. Astrid Hekne dreams of a life beyond her village, beyond marriage, children, and working the land to the end of her days.

Pastor Kai Schweigaard arrives to take over the small parish, with its 700-year-old stave church carved with pagan deities. The two bells in the tower, forged by Astrid’s forefather, are said to hold supernatural powers. The villagers are wary of the new pastor and his resolve to do away with their centuries-old traditions, but Astrid finds herself drawn to him.

When another stranger arrives from Dresden, with grand plans for the church itself, Astrid is thunderstruck. She has never met anyone like him; he seems so different, so sensitive. But will she choose her homeland and the pastor, or an uncertain future in Germany?

And then the bells begin to ring . . .