"Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decades worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries." --book jacket

"Abandoned by her mother at age seven, Alexandra Winslow took solace in the mystery stories she read with her devoted father--and soon she was writing them herself, slowly graduating to dark, violent, complex crime stories that reflected skill and imagination far beyond her years. After her father's early death, at fourteen Alex is taken in by the nuns of a local convent, where she finds twenty-six mothers to take the place of the one she lost, and...

"Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young, but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about...

"Beth Rivers, known to the world as Elizabeth Fairchild, has spent years as a bestselling novelist. Her twisty, page-turning thrillers have garnered a legion of fans, but unfortunately, her storytelling landed her in an unbelievable tale of her own--a situation even more terrifying than she could have dreamed. Crazed Elizabeth Fairchild superfan Levi Brooks stalked and kidnapped Beth, holding her captive inside a van for three days. She escaped...

"Dyscalculia is an exquisite and raw booklength essay that follows Camonghne Felix's journey to survey and reconfigure the pieces of a broken heart in order to rebuild one that is entirely her own. Felix uses her childhood "dyscalculia"--a disorder that makes it difficult to learn math--as a metaphor for the consequences of her miscalculations in intimacy. Dyscalculia negotiates the misalignments of perception and reality, love and harm, and the politics...

"At a Texas county fair, amidst carousels and a bustling midway, children’s book author Elle Portman is enjoying a rare night out with her favorite cowboy: her two-year-old son, Charlie. But just as they’re about to head home, the unthinkable happens: a shooter opens fire into the crowd, causing widespread panic to erupt all around them. Also caught in the melee was corporate consultant Calder Hudson. Arrogant, self-centered, and high off his...

"On a perfect June day, Vivian Howe, author of thirteen beach novels and mother of three nearly grown children, is killed in a hit-and-run car accident while jogging near her home on Nantucket. She ascends to the Beyond where she's assigned to a Person named Martha, who allows Vivi to watch what happens below for one last summer. Vivi also is granted three 'nudges' to change the outcome of events on earth, and with her daughter Willa on her third...

"Kaylee Sloan’s home in Southern California is full of wonderful memories of the woman who raised her. But the memories are prolonging her grief over her mother’s recent death. A successful author, Kaylee hoped she could pour herself into her work. Instead she has terrible writer’s block and a looming deadline. Determined to escape distractions and avoid the holiday season, Kaylee borrows a cabin in Virgin River. She knows the isolation will...

"In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another. In Smith’s own words, “To write a book about...

"Loretta Sage's novels are filled with ancient tombs and daring adventures, but that doesn't mean she's prepared for them in real life. When she is kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire who wants her to locate a legendary lost city, Loretta's handsome cover model, Alan, sets off on a heroic but hapless rescue mission. Thrust into...the jungle, the unlikely pair must work together to survive the elements--and each other--to find the city's fabled...