Idaho: A Novel by Emily Ruskovich

From O. Henry Prize–winning author Emily Ruskovich comes a stunning debut novel about love and forgiveness, about the violence of memory and the equal violence of its loss.

Ann and Wade have carved out a life for themselves from a rugged terrain in northern Idaho, where they are bound together by more than love. With her husband's memory fading, Ann attempts to piece together the truth of what happened to Wade's first wife, Jenny, and to their daughters. In a story written in exquisite prose and told from multiple perspectives—including Ann, Wade, and Jenny, now in prison—we gradually learn of the mysterious and shocking act that fractured Wade and Jenny's lives, of the love and compassion that brought Ann and Wade together, and of the memories that reverberate through the lives of every character in Idaho.

In a wild emotional and physical landscape, Wade's past becomes the center of Ann's imagination, as Ann becomes determined to understand the family she never knew—and to take responsibility for them, reassembling their lives, and her own.

320 pages (January 2017)

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Title Read-alikes: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout; The Very Marrow of Our Bones by Christine Higdon; Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden; Monogamy by Sue Miller; The Dutch House by Ann Patchett; The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout; Remember Me Like This by Anthony Bret Johnston; Maine by Courtney J. Sulivan; and Divisadero  by Michael Ondaatje.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.

Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.

192 pages (January 2014)

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Title Read-alikes:  Who is Rich by Matthew Klam; The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas; The Thing About December by Donal Ryan; Outline by Rachel Cusk; How to Be Both by Ali Smith; A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet; Writers & Lovers by Lily King; Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino; and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman.

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.

Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as “far and away, this country’s best selling poet” by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years.

Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver’s work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

455 pages (October 2017)

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Title Read-alikes: Bright Dead Things by Ada Limon; Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh; River Flow by David Whyte; When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry by Joy Harjo; Dearly by Margaret Atwood; Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins; Drinking from the River of Light by Mark Nepo; The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich; and Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States.

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America - the first African-American to serve in that role - she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her - from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it - in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations - and whose story inspires us to do the same.

400 pages (November 2018)

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Title Read-alikes: A Promised Land by Barack Obama; More Than Enough: claiming space for who you are (no matter what they say) by Elaine Welteroth; The Obamas by Jodi Kantor; Educated by Tara Westover; Born a Crime: stories from a South African childhood by Trevor Noah; Life Undercover: coming of age in the CIA by Amaryllis Fox; Mighty Justice: my life in civil rights by Dovey Johnson; The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the making of an American dynasty by Susan Page; and Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

#1 New York Times Bestseller• The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man's coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed.

Named one of the best books of the year by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times • USA Today • San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • Esquire • Newsday • Booklist

Trevor Noah's unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents' indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa's tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man's relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.

The stories collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty. His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother's unconventional, unconditional love.

304 pages (November 2016)

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Title Read-alikes: They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib; You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: a memoir by Sherman Alexie; Lost and Found in Johannesburg: a memoir by Mark Gevisser; Believe Me by Eddie Izzard; The Education of Kevin Powell: a yong boy's journey into manhood by Kevin Powell; You Can't Touch My Hair and Other Things I Still Have to Explain by Phoebe Robinson; Bare Bones: I'm not lonely if you're reading this by Bobby Bones; The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish; Black Fortunes: the story of the first six African Americans who escaped slavery and became millionaires by Shomari Wills; Becoming by Michelle Obama; and Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson.

The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel Davis Huber

The Velveteen Daughter reveals for the first time the true story of two remarkable women: Margery Williams Bianco, the author of one of the most beloved children's books of all time - The Velveteen Rabbit - and her daughter Pamela, a world-renowned child prodigy artist whose fame at one time greatly eclipses her mother's.

But celebrity at such an early age exacts a great toll. Pamela's dreams elude her as she struggles with severe depressions, an overbearing father, an obsessive love affair, and a spectacularly misguided marriage. Throughout, her life raft is her mother.

The glamorous art world of Europe and New York in the early 20th century and a supporting cast of luminaries - Eugene O'Neill and his wife Agnes (Margery's niece), Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Richard Hughes, author of A High Wind in Jamaica - provide a vivid backdrop to the Biancos' story. From the opening pages, the novel will captivate readers with its multifaceted and illuminating observations on art, family, and the consequences of genius touched by madness.

416 pages (July 2017)

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Title Read-alikes: A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline; All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews; Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich; We Are Water by Wally Lamb; Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff; Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett; A Little Life Hanya Yanagihara; The History of Love by Nicole Krauss; Motherland by Maria Hummel; A House Among the Trees by Julia Glass; The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli; Salt Houses by Hala Alyan; Miss Jane by Brad Watson; and The Ice Shelf by Anne Kennedy.

The honey bus : a memoir of loss, courage and a girl saved by bees by Meredith May

An extraordinary story of a young girl who finds solace in one of nature’s most mysterious and beguiling creatures: the honeybee.

Meredith May recalls the first time a honeybee crawled on her arm.

She was five years old, her parents had recently split and suddenly she found herself in the care of her grandfather, an eccentric beekeeper who made honey in a rusty old military bus in the yard.

That first close encounter with a bee was at once terrifying and exhilarating for May, and in that moment she discovered that everything she needed to know about life and family was right before her eyes, in the secret world of bees.

May was drawn to the art of beekeeping as an escape from her troubled reality.

Her mother had receded into a volatile cycle of madness and despair and spent most days locked away in the bedroom. It was during this pivotal time in May’s childhood that she learned to take care of herself, forged an unbreakable bond with her grandfather and opened her eyes to the magic and wisdom of nature.

The bees became a guiding force in May’s life, teaching her about family and community, loyalty and survival and the unequivocal relationship between a mother and her child.

Part memoir, part beekeeping odyssey, The Honey Bus is an remarkable story about finding home in the most unusual of places, and how a tiny, little-understood insect could save a life.

318 pages (April 2019)

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Title Read-alikes: A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes; How to Be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery; H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald; Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder by Julia Zarankin; My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout; Fire Season by Philip Connors; The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Bailey; Wintering by Katherine May; Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl; The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson; This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger; and Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler.