en-US Sun, 13 Apr 2025 06:24:29 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 133938853 Women! In! Peril! balance wry humor and gravitas to explore the complexities of queerness, toxic relationships, parenting and divorce, Asian and Asian American identity, and more.]]> 288 Jessie Ren Marshall 1639732276 :) 4 3.64 2024
author: Jessie Ren Marshall
name: :)
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> 199454353 An influencer attempts to derail a viral TV marketing campaign with her violent cult following. A marriage between two ghost hunters is threatened when one of them loses her ability to see spirits. The lives of a famous painter in the twilight of her career and a teenage UFO enthusiast converge when a mysterious glowing orb appears in their small desert town. And a slasher-flick screenwriter looking for inspiration escapes a pack of wild dogs only to find herself locked in an SUV with a strange man beside her. Set primarily in deserts throughout the American Southwest, Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights is a debut collection of stories about women and girls at the crossroads of mundane daily life and existential dread.

From the all-too-real horror of a sexual predator on a college campus to a lost sister transformed by cave-dwelling creatures, Mystery Lights grapples with terrors both familiar and fantastic, introducing an electrifying new voice in contemporary fiction while bringing to light the many faces of the forces that haunt us.]]> 256 Lena Valencia 1959030620 :) 3 3.59 2024
author: Lena Valencia
name: :)
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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]]> 208035444 WINNER OF THE BBC NATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD In my life, I had always been a good woman; controlling what it was that I wanted. But recently, I had started to notice my bad energy, and I began to follow it, wondering where it would take me . . . A woman has an unexpected outburst at a corporate therapy session for working mothers. A couple find some long-overdue time to rekindle their relationship and make an ill-advised home movie. A pregnant film director plots revenge on the actress who betrayed her. An ex-wife deliberately causes conflict at her ex-husband's wedding. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things illuminates the lives of malicious, subversive and untamed women. Exploring failed sisterhood, dubious parenting and the dark side of modern love, this powerful and funny collection exposes how society wants women to behave, and shows what happens when they refuse.]]> 256 Naomi Wood 0063399725 :) 2 2.74 2024
author: Naomi Wood
name: :)
average rating: 2.74
book published: 2024
rating: 2
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]]> 215805897 A stray cat brings together five strangers over the course of one fateful summer in this heartwarming novel about love, found family, and the power of connection.

Núria, a single-by-choice barista with a resentment for the “crazy cat lady�� label, is a member of The Meow-Yorkers, a group in Brooklyn who takes care of the neighborhood’s stray cats. On one of her volunteering days, she starts finding Post-It notes from a secret admirer at the spot where her favorite stray lives—a black cat named Cat. Like most cats, he is rather curious and sly, so of course he knows who the notes are from. Núria, however, is clueless.

Are the notes from Collin, a bestselling author and self-professed hermit with a weakness for good coffee? Are they from Lily, a fresh-out-of-high school Georgia native searching for her long-lost half-sister? Are they from Omar, the beloved neighborhood mailman going through an early mid-life crisis? Or are they from Bong, the grieving widower who owns her favorite bodega? When Cat suddenly falls ill, these five strangers find themselves connected in their desire to care for him and discover that chance encounters can lead to the meaningful connections they've been searching for.]]> 304 Tanya Guerrero 059387384X :) 4 4.22 2025
author: Tanya Guerrero
name: :)
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2025
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/13
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]]> 182761396 Set in a world of perilous magic and moonlit forests, this seductive romantic fantasy tells the story of a defiant changeling, her cursed sister, and the dangerous fae lord she must defeat to save her family.

In a kingdom where magic has been lost, Fia is a rare changeling, left behind by the wicked Fair Folk when they stole the High Queen's daughter and retreated behind the locked gates of Tír na nÓg.

Most despise Fia's fae blood. But the queen raises her as a daughter and trains her to be a spy. Meanwhile, the real princess Eala is bound to Tír na nÓg, cursed to become a swan by day and only returning to her true form at night.

When a hidden gate to the realm is discovered, Fia is tasked by the queen to retrieve the princess and break her curse. But she doesn’t go with her is prince Rogan, Fia's dearest childhood friend—and Eala’s betrothed.

As they journey through the forests of the Folk, where magic winds through the roots of the trees and beauty can be a deadly illusion, Fia’s mission is complicated by her feelings for the prince…and her unexpected attraction to the dark-hearted fae lord holding Eala captive. Irian might be more monster than man, but he seems to understand Fia in a way no one ever has.

Soon, Fia begins to question the truth of her mission. But time is running out to break her sister's curse. And unraveling the secrets of the past might destroy everything she has come to love.]]> 496 Lyra Selene 0316564966 :) 3 3.70 2024
author: Lyra Selene
name: :)
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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]]> 126918070 For fans of Ariadne, a spellbinding debut fantasy about a human who gets trapped with the god of Autumn, who brings with him life-threatening danger and a forbidden romance.

Under the right circumstances, would even a god fall?

Tirne is one of four humans rigorously selected to usher the turn of the seasons into the mortal world. Every year, she escorts the taciturn god Autumn between the godly and human realms. Autumn’s seasonal stay among mortals brings cooler weather, changing leaves, and the harvest of apples and gourds until Winter takes his place.

This year, the enchanted Mirror that separates their worlds shatters after Tirne and Autumn pass through, trapping both of them in the human realm. As the endless autumn stretches on, crops begin to fail and the threat of starvation looms. Away from the magic of the gods�� home, Tirne’s debilitating headaches return with a vengeance. Worse, Autumn’s extended stay in the human realm turns him ever more mortal and vulnerable, stirring a new, forbidden attraction to Tirne.

While the priesthood scrambles to find a way to reassemble the Mirror, Tirne digs into the temple’s secrets and finds an unlikely ally—or enemy—in the enigmatic sorcerer and master of poisons, Sidriel. Thrown into a world of mystery, betrayal, and espionage as she searches for the truth, might Tirne lose her morals, her hard-earned position, and the illicit spark between her and Autumn?]]> 320 Amy Avery 1250896495 :) 4 3.17 2024
author: Amy Avery
name: :)
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/13
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]]> 216247518 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.]]> 208 Katie Kitamura 059385232X :) 3 3.76 2025
author: Katie Kitamura
name: :)
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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]]> 218671812 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing�����Ի���Eight Perfect Murders comes an inventive, utterly propulsive murder-mystery in reverse, tracing a marriage back in time to uncover the dark secret at its heart.

Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for over twenty-five years. They live in a beautiful Victorian on the north shore of Massachusetts. Wendy is a published poet and Thom teaches English literature at a nearby university. Their son, Jason, is all grown up. All is well…except that Wendy wants to murder her husband.

What happens next has everything to do with what happened before. The story of Wendy and Thom’s marriage is told in reverse, moving backward through time to witness key moments from the couple’s lives—their fiftieth birthday party, buying their home, Jason’s birth, the mysterious death of a work colleague—all painting a portrait of a marriage defined by a single terrible act they plotted together many years ago.

Eventually we learn the details of what Thom and Wendy did in their early twenties, a secret that has kept them bound together through the length of their marriage. But its power over them is fraying, and each of them begins to wonder if they would be better off making sure their spouse carries their secrets to the grave.]]> 288 Peter Swanson 0063433621 :) 0 to-read 3.59 2025
author: Peter Swanson
name: :)
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
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]]> 216971219 A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.

Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something a mysterious staircase to nowhere.

One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . . .]]> 400 Chuck Wendig 0593156560 :) 0 to-read 3.89 2025
author: Chuck Wendig
name: :)
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
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]]> 215362444 336 Katy Hays 0593875559 :) 3 3.66 2025
author: Katy Hays
name: :)
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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]]> 30753704
But hidden inside the socially awkward, fussy busybody is a woman who has more imagination, bigger dreams, and a warmer heart that anyone around her realizes.

When Britt-Marie walks out on her cheating husband and has to fend for herself in the miserable backwater town of Borg—of which the kindest thing one can say is that it has a road going through it—she finds work as the caretaker of a soon-to-be demolished recreation center. The fastidious Britt-Marie soon finds herself being drawn into the daily doings of her fellow citizens, an odd assortment of miscreants, drunkards, layabouts. Most alarming of all, she’s given the impossible task of leading the supremely untalented children’s soccer team to victory. In this small town of misfits, can Britt-Marie find a place where she truly belongs?

Funny and moving, sweet and inspiring, Britt-Marie Was Here celebrates the importance of community and connection in a world that can feel isolating.

The New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove and My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry “returns with this heartwarming story about a woman rediscovering herself after a personal crisis�� fans of Backman will find another winner in these pages.”]]> 324 Fredrik Backman 1501142542 :) 4 4.12 2014
author: Fredrik Backman
name: :)
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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]]> 214152321 A family confronts a past that is both keeping them together and preventing them from breaking free.

Meet the Valiat family. In Iran they were somebodies. In America they’re nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose who stayed in Tehran during the revolution. Her daughters, Shirin and Seema, left for America in 1979. She lives in a shabby apartment, paranoid and alone—except when she is visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law–breaking granddaughter who takes her debauchery with a side of purpose yet somehow manages to survive. The other granddaughter, Bita, is a self-righteous but lost law student spending her days in New York City eating pancakes and quietly giving away her belongings.

When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail by Bita, the family’s brittle status quo cracks open. Shirin embarks upon a grand but half-baked quest to restore the family name—but what does that even mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Will they ever realize that life is more than just an old story?]]> 384 Sanam Mahloudji 166801579X :) 0 currently-reading 3.54 2024
author: Sanam Mahloudji
name: :)
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
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]]> 216970882 A darkly funny debut novel about two estranged sisters who are unknowingly thrown together by their problematic father’s dying wish

Mickey and Arlo are half sisters. But they’ve never spoken and never met. Arlo adored her father—but always lived in the shadow of his magnetic personality and burdensome vices. Meanwhile, their father abandoned ​Mickey and her mother years ago, and Mickey has hated him since. When she receives news of her father’s passing, Mickey is shocked to learn that he’s left her his not-inconsiderable fortune. The Mickey must attend a series of therapy sessions before the money can be released.

Unbeknownst to either woman, the psychologist Mickey’s father has ensured she meets with is her half sister, Arlo. Having cared for her beloved father on his sickbed, Arlo is devastated to discover he’s cut her out of his will. She resolves to learn where the money went and why.

Working together as therapist and patient—with no idea that they’re in fact sisters—Arlo and Mickey soon get under each other’s skin. Arlo, eager to outrun a mistake in her professional past, is keen to redeem herself with her new client. But Mickey is far from the model patient. As Mickey’s personal and professional lives spiral out of control and Arlo uncovers the truth about who her new patient really is, the sisters find themselves on a crash course that will break—or save—them both.]]> 344 Morgan Dick 0593832264 :) 3 3.77 2025
author: Morgan Dick
name: :)
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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]]> 220160165 A wildly inventive and entertaining novel about a sci-fi writing group whose fictional universe and personal dramas begin to collide and collapse from the critically acclaimed author of the “timeless and original�� (The New York Times) The Body Scout.

Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln’s life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns—he has a greater calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written The Star Rot Chronicles. Written collectively by Michael’s best (and perhaps only) friend Taras K. Castle and his misfit sci-fi writing group, the Orb 4, the stories follow Captain Baldwin and his fearless crew on their mind-bending adventures across the Metallic Realms, from solar whales swallowing suns at the edge of spacetime to interstellar love triangles. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished—until now.

But the most urgent story Michael must tell takes place in the more intimate (if no less dramatic) confines of literary Brooklyn. Behind the greatest multiverse ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the funhouse reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, and the true reasons for the group’s fallout begin to emerge. As he labors away in hiding, Michael has just one to bring the Metallic Realms to the world. No matter the cost.

Metallic Realms is a genre-breaking ode to golden-age science fiction, friendship, creativity, and the power and perils of storytelling.]]> 320 Lincoln Michel 1668058677 :) 2 3.87
author: Lincoln Michel
name: :)
average rating: 3.87
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rating: 2
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]]> 216522711 They didn't know they would change each other.

Following the unlikely friendship of four of the first ever women to matriculate at Oxford University in the aftermath of the First World War, a captivating debut novel about sisterhood, self-determination and the many forms courage can take.

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world's most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms. Beatrice, Dora, Marianne and Otto (collectively known as The Eights) have come here from all walks of life, and they are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship.

Dora was never meant to go to university, but, after losing both her brother and her fiancé on the battlefield, has arrived in their place. Politically-minded Beatrice, daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way - and some friends her own age. Otto was a nurse during the war but is excited to return to her socialite lifestyle in Oxford - where she hopes to find distraction from the memories that haunt her. And finally Marianne, the quiet, clever daughter of a village pastor, who has a shocking secret she must hide from everyone, even her new friends, if she is to succeed.

But Oxford's dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920, misogyny is still rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are still very real indeed. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever.]]> 384 Joanna Miller 0593851412 :) 3 4.03 2025
author: Joanna Miller
name: :)
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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]]> 216247494 The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this sharp and touching novel about growing up at the intersection of ambition and assimilation.

Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family, but the truth about their family is much more complicated. As young adults, they're on the precipice of new ventures—Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naive freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.

Cut off entirely from the outside world, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long dusty days in camp, forced to work jobs they hate and acclimate to life without the internet. That is until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this as an opportunity to tell the world about the horrors of detention—and bolster her own reporting career in the process.

Informed by real-life events from Japanese incarceration, the Vietnam War, and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own—much too close for comfort. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism in America, M�� Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to each other, and to ourselves, after tragedy.]]> 352 Kevin Nguyen 0593731689 :) 3 4.06
author: Kevin Nguyen
name: :)
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 3
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]]> 211934965 All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.

As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.

Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.]]> 336 Ray Nayler 0374615365 :) 3 4.27 2025
author: Ray Nayler
name: :)
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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]]> 211080534 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters comes the story of a courageous young Imperial Grand Duchess who scandalized Europe in search of freedom.

In 1795, Catherine the Great of Russia was in search of a bride for her grandson Constantine, who stood third in line to her throne. In an eerie echo of her own story, Catherine selected an innocent young German princess, Julie of Saxe-Coburg, aunt of the future Queen Victoria. Though Julie had everything a young bride could wish for, she was alone in a court dominated by an aging empress and riven with rivalries, plotting, and gossip―not to mention her brute of a husband, who was tender one moment and violent the next. She longed to leave Russia and her disastrous marriage, but her family in Germany refused to allow her to do so.

Desperate for love, Julie allegedly sought consolation in the arms of others. Finally, Tsar Alexander granted her permission to leave in 1801, even though her husband was now heir to the throne. Rootless in Europe, Julie gave birth to two―possibly three―illegitimate children, all of whom she was forced to give up for adoption. Despite entreaties from Constantine to return and provide an heir, she refused, eventually finding love with her own married physician.

At a time when many royal brides meekly submitted to disastrous marriages, Julie proved to be a woman ahead of her time, sacrificing her reputation and a life of luxury in exchange for the freedom to live as she wished. The Rebel Romanov is the inspiring tale of a bold woman who, until now, has been ignored by history.]]> 336 Helen Rappaport 1250273129 :) 0 to-read 4.01 2025
author: Helen Rappaport
name: :)
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
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]]> 213816143 A stunning reimagining of Bluebeard—one of the most mythologized serial killers—twisted into a modern tale of toxic masculinity, a feminist sermon, and a folktale for the twenty-first century.

The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy—until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.

Natalia Theodoridou’s haunting and unforgettable debut novel, Sour Cherry, confronts age-old systems of gender and power, long-held excuses made for bad men, and the complicated reasons we stay captive to the monsters we love.]]> 312 Natalia Theodoridou 1963108191 :) 0 3.76 2025
author: Natalia Theodoridou
name: :)
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
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]]> 214152475 A “superb…refreshing�� (The New York Times Book Review) reimagining of the myth of Persephone and Demeter set on a lush private island, exploring themes of addiction and sex, family, independence, and who holds the power in a modern underworld.

Camp counselor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother’s disappointment, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. The CEO of a pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is wealthy, divorced, and magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo offers her a job, Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island. Plied with luxury and the opiates manufactured by his company, she tells herself she’s in charge. Her mother, Emer, head of a teetering agricultural NGO, senses otherwise. With her daughter seemingly vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help that only she can hear.

Alternating between the two women’s perspectives, Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America’s late-capitalist mythos. Lyon’s reinvention of Persephone and Demeter’s story makes for a haunting, electric novel that readers will not soon forget.]]> 336 Rachel Lyon 1668020866 :) 1 3.62
author: Rachel Lyon
name: :)
average rating: 3.62
book published:
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> 197522433
For fans of Patricia Lockwood and Marlowe Granados—a whip-smart, absurdly funny debut novel by a bold new talent in sad girl literature.

Everyone knows something’s off, but nobody can agree on just what it is. Maybe it’s the weather; maybe everyone’s just so damn sensitive these days. Or maybe it’s because the animals of the world have finally had enough, besieging towns and cities and terrorizing their human residents.

Jenlena and her best friend Daphne are two humanities grads in their early 20s, trying to find their way in a society that has just eradicated all animals for the safety of humanity. In the post-fauna world, Jenlena transforms from an aspiring poet to a gig worker, capitalizing on other people’s grief by selling house plants that have come to replace pets and cosplaying as dogs for pay. Meanwhile Daphne, a once-promising student, flounders in a deep depression, smoking weed and ditching work to hang out with her once famous, now canceled boyfriend. When Jenlena meets the California billionaire Roderick Maeve, and the two become romantically entangled, she is exposed to a new understanding of wealth, power, and the gender economy—just as the world hurtles toward its alleged salvation.

Marked with Frankie Barnet’s poignant intelligence and sly sense of humor, Mood Swings is a stand-out debut novel that imagines with pitch-perfect absurdity what comes after life as we know it.]]> 304 Frankie Barnet 1662602596 :) 3 3.58 2024
author: Frankie Barnet
name: :)
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 75715117 Selected as an Evening Standard 'one to watch in 2023'

It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.

Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.

Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.

But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. But only one can offer her real happiness.

Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.]]> 288 Chloe Michelle Howarth 0857308416 :) 3 4.33 2023
author: Chloe Michelle Howarth
name: :)
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 54737060 A whip-smart, piercing debut novel, Smile and Look Pretty follows four assistants who band together to take on their toxic office environments in the ultimate comeuppance.

Online they're the Aggressive One, the Bossy One, the Bitchy One and the Emotional One. In real life, best friends Cate, Lauren, Olivia and Max all have one thing in common--they're overworked, overtired and underpaid assistants to some of the most powerful men in the entertainment industries. When they secretly start an anonymous blog detailing their experiences, their posts go viral and hundreds of other women come forward with stories of their own. Confronted with the risks of newfound fame and the possibility of their identities being revealed, they have to contend with what happens when you try to change the world.

Gripping, razor sharp and scathingly funny, Smile and Look Pretty is a fast-paced millennial rallying cry about the consequences of whistleblowing for an entire generation, and a testament to the strength of female friendship and what can be accomplished when women come together.]]> 368 Amanda Pellegrino 0778311120 :) 3 3.63 2022
author: Amanda Pellegrino
name: :)
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 58684299 In this “deeply original�� (Elif Batuman) and “violently funny�� (Myriam Gurba) story, a young lawyer finally confronts her dark past so she can live in a more peaceful future.

To the outside observer, Vivian is a success story—a dedicated lawyer who advocates for mentally ill patients at a New York City psychiatric hospital. Privately, Vivian contends with the memories and aftereffects of her bad childhood—compounded by the everyday stresses of being a Black Latinx woman in America. She lives in a constant state of hypervigilant awareness that makes even a simple subway ride into a heart-pounding drama.

For years, Vivian has self-medicated with a mix of dating, dieting, dark humor and smoking weed with her BFF, Jane. But after a family reunion prompts Vivian to take a bold step, she finds herself alone in new and terrifying ways, without even Jane to confide in, and she starts to unravel. Will she find a way to repair what matters most to her?

A debut from a stunning talent, Post-traumatic is a new kind of survivor narrative, featuring a complex heroine who is blazingly, indelibly alive. With razor-sharp prose and mordant wit, Chantal V. Johnson performs an extraordinary feat, delivering a psychologically astute story about the aftermath of trauma that somehow manages to brim with warmth, laughter, and hope.]]> 320 Chantal V. Johnson 0316264237 :) 4 3.71 2022
author: Chantal V. Johnson
name: :)
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2022
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 216867498
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom.

With this gothic coming-of-age tale, novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]> 336 Lucy Rose 1399619713 :) 3 3.95 2025
author: Lucy Rose
name: :)
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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]]> 199797848 A controversial Los Angeles author attempts to revive her career and finally find true love in this hilarious nod to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction.

Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student who smells like metallic orchids and is researching 1950s lesbian pulp, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.

Penelope, a painter living off Urban Outfitters settlement money, immediately ingratiates herself in Astrid’s life, bonding with her best friends and family, just as Astrid and Ivy begin to date in person. Astrid feels judged and threatened by Penelope, a responsible older vegan, but also finds her irresistibly sexy.

When Astrid receives an unexpected call from her agent with the news that actress and influencer Kat Gold wants to adapt her previous novel for TV, Astrid finally has a chance to resurrect her waning career. But the pressure causes Astrid’s worst vice to rear its head—the Patricia Highsmith, a blend of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes—and results in blackouts and a disturbing series of events.

Unapologetically feminine yet ribald, steamy yet hilarious, Anna Dorn has crafted an exquisite homage to the lesbian pulp of yore, reclaiming it for our internet- and celebrity-obsessed world.]]> 352 Anna Dorn 1668047179 :) 4 3.89 2024
author: Anna Dorn
name: :)
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 48904765
With the help of Freud—or whoever he is—she begins to untangle her Oedipal leanings, her upbringing, and her desires. Jessica Gross's debut is unflinchingly perceptive and honest, darkly funny, and unafraid of mining the deepest fears of contemporary lives.]]> 184 Jessica Gross 1951213122 :) 3 3.00 2020
author: Jessica Gross
name: :)
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2020
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 49535227
Part breathless confession, part lucid critique, Acts of Desperation renders a consciousness split between rebellion and submission, between escaping degradation and eroticizing it, between loving and being lovable. With unsettling, electric precision, Nolan dissects one of life’s most elusive mysteries: Why do we want what we want, and how do we want it?

Heralding the arrival of a stunning new literary talent, Acts of Desperation interrogates the nature of fantasy, desire, and power, challenging us to reckon honestly with our own insatiability.]]> 288 Megan Nolan :) 4 3.71 2021
author: Megan Nolan
name: :)
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 211026148 A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut (“A brilliant, powerful, and memorable book�� —The New York Times)“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.�� Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse.  Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm. Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.]]> 528 Adam Ross 0385351305 :) 3 4.01 2025
author: Adam Ross
name: :)
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 219269948 The Paris Apartment meets Only Murders in the Building in this debut murder mystery with an intriguing cast of characters inhabiting a quirky block of flats in modern-day London.

When a minor criminal is murdered in the smallest residential square in London, elderly heiress and landlady Celeste van Duren recruits two of her tenants to investigate. Her cleaner, Audrey, knows everyone and is liked by all, while failed writer Lewis is known by no one. He hates his job, hates his life, and he’s not that fond of Audrey either—but Celeste is persuasive.
As they hunt for clues in and around the Square, they discover everyone has something to hide, including their fellow residents. Audrey and Lewis must find a way to work together if they’re to find the killer in their midst. Assuming of course, there’s just the one . . .

Cozy crime enthusiasts will not be able to get enough of Marchfield Square and its residents.]]> 400 Nicola Whyte 1454958413 :) 2 3.84 2025
author: Nicola Whyte
name: :)
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 214565598 From multiple award-winning author Daryl Gregory comes a madcap adventure following two friends on a cross-country bus tour through the mind-boggling glitches in their simulated world as they grapple with love, family, secrets, and the very nature of reality in a simulation.

JP and Dulin have been the best of friends for decades. When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned, Dulin decides it’s the perfect time for one last a week-long bus tour of North America’s Impossibles, the physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles that started cropping up seven years earlier—right after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum. The outing, courtesy of Canterbury Trails Tours, promises the trip of a (not completely real) lifetime in a (not completely deluxe) coach.

Their fellow passengers are 21st-century pilgrims, each of them on the tour for their own reasons. There’s a nun hunting for an absent God, a pregnant influencer determined to make her child too famous to be deleted, a crew of horny octogenarians living each day like it’s their last, and a professor on the run from leather-clad sociopaths who take The Matrix as scripture. Each stop on this trip is stranger than the last—a Tunnel outside of time, a zero gravity Geyser, the compound of motivational-speaking avatar—with everyone barreling toward the tour’s iconic final stop Ghost City, where unbeknownst to our travelers the answer to who is running the simulation may await.

When We Were Real is a tour-de-force and exploration of what really matters, even in an artificial world.]]> 464 Daryl Gregory 1668060043 :) 3 4.19 2025
author: Daryl Gregory
name: :)
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 216997496 Heathers meets The Stepford Wives in this creepy and frighteningly funny dark thriller about a woman who will do anything to find her missing sister. Even pretend to be one of them.

After her twin sister, Chiara, goes missing at a mom-fluencer weekend, Adrienne Shaw will find her no matter what it takes. They may have been on the outs, but no one comes for her sister and gets away with it.

It’s been a year, the authorities have no answers, and her brother-in-law is useless in the matter. It’s time for Adrienne to take the case into her own hands. Following in Chiara’s last footsteps, Adrienne goes undercover, infiltrating the same influencer retreat as the last thing she wants to an Instamommy.

The remote ranch in Northern California is certainly welcoming—in a cult-adjacent kind of way. A charismatic leader, communal crafts, fixed smiles—and a lot of dead eyes.

Going on gut instinct and chasing a wild theory—that Chiara came here and never left—Adrienne is determined to uncover the truth before the too-perfect-to-believe women figure out who Adrienne really a threat to be eliminated.]]> 271 Elizabeth Rose Quinn 1662524803 :) 2 3.53 2025
author: Elizabeth Rose Quinn
name: :)
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2025
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 214537763 "The missing boy is 10-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he's a little shit."

Florence Grimes, age thirty-one, always takes the easy way out. Single, broke and unfulfilled after the humiliating end to her girl-band career, she has only one reason to get out of bed each day: her ten-year-old son Dylan. But then Alfie Risby, her son’s bully and the heir to a vast frozen-food empire, mysteriously vanishes during a class trip, and Dylan becomes the prime suspect.

Florence, for once, is faced with a task she can’t quit: She’s got to find Alfie and clear her son’s name or risk losing Dylan forever—never mind that she has no useful skills (let alone investigative ones) and that all the other school moms hate her. Oh, and she has a reason to suspect Dylan might not be as innocent as she’d like to believe.]]> 384 Sarah Harman 0593851463 :) 3 3.59 2025
author: Sarah Harman
name: :)
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 213395487 A fast-moving, heartbreaking collection of linked stories that evokes the joy and alienation between generations and classes in the era of mass overwhelm.

From Lydia Millet—“the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves�� (Chicago Tribune)—comes an inventive new collection of short fiction. Atavists follows a group of families, couples, and loners in their collisions, confessions, and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses, and medieval role-playing festivals.

The various ��-ists�� who people these linked stories—from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists—include a professor who’s morbidly fixated on an old friend’s Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel’s fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbors after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner dad obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his backyard.]]> 240 Lydia Millet 1324074418 :) 2 3.98
author: Lydia Millet
name: :)
average rating: 3.98
book published:
rating: 2
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]]> 199125874 On France's golden Riviera, the wife of an artist gives him an ultimatum: her or me. The dazzling new novel from Sophie Haydock, author of The Flames.

This is the story of three women - one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, the other a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years. The third is his daughter, caught in the crossfire between her mother and a father she adores.

Amelie is first drawn to Henri Matisse as a way of escaping the conventional life expected of her. A free spirit, she sees in this budding young artist a glorious future for them both. Ambitious and driven, she gives everything for her husband's art, ploughing her own desires, her time, her money into sustaining them both, even through years of struggle and disappointment.

Lydia Delectorskaya is a young Russian emigree, who fled her homeland following the death of her mother. After a fractured childhood, she is trying to make a place for herself on France's golden Riviera, amid the artists, film stars and dazzling elite. Eventually she finds employment with the Matisse family. From this point on, their lives are set on a collision course....

Marguerite is Matisse's eldest daughter. When the life of her family implodes, she must find her own way to make her mark and to navigate divided loyalties.

Based on a true story, Madame Matisse is a stunning novel about drama and betrayal; emotion and sex; glamour and tragedy, all set in the hotbed of the 1930s art movement in France. In art, as in life, this a time when the rules were made to be broken...]]> 384 Sophie Haydock 1473588685 :) 4 4.29 2025
author: Sophie Haydock
name: :)
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 58395039
“I can’t help but compare our worth as writers, as lovers, as women. Is anything solely mine, or will I always dwell in someone else’s shadow?��

Twenty-four-year-old bookseller and New Yorker Naomi Ackerman, desperate to write a novel, struggles to find the right story to tell. When, after years of disastrous Tinder dates, she meets Caleb—a perfectly nice guy with a Welsh accent and a unique patience for all of her quirks—she feels she's finally stumbled onto a time-honored subject: love. But then Caleb's ex-girlfriend, Rosemary, enters the scene.

When Naomi learns that Rosemary is not safely tucked away overseas as she'd assumed but in fact lives in New York and works in the literary world, she is fundamentally threatened and intrigued in equal measure. On paper, Rosemary sounds like a better version of Naomi—but if they both fell for the same man, they must have something more essential in common.

Determined to figure out how their stories intertwine, Naomi's casual Instagram stalking morphs into a full-blown friendship under false pretenses. She can't seem to get herself to quit Rosemary, in whom she discovers an unexpected confidant—and she can't stop writing about her either, having now found a more interesting subject for her nascent novel. As her lies and half-truths spiral out of her control, and fact and fiction become increasingly difficult to separate, Naomi manipulates the most important people in her life—her family, her friends, Caleb, Rosemary, and, perhaps most devastatingly, herself—in pursuit of her craft. Ultimately, she’s forced to decide who and what she's willing to sacrifice to write them all the perfect ending.]]> 336 Caitlin Barasch 0593185595 :) 3 3.47 2022
author: Caitlin Barasch
name: :)
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 211004124 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes the story of three siblings who, upon the death of their father, are forced to reckon with their long-festering rivalries, dangerous abilities, and the crushing weight of all their unrealized adolescent potential.

Where there’s a will, there’s a war.

Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.

Or at least, so they like to think.

Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You're welcome! If only her father's fortune wasn't her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud.

Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he's losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.

Eilidh, once the world's most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth—by confirming she'd been his favorite all along.

On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins—but which Wren will come out on top?]]> 512 Olivie Blake 1250883407 :) 2 3.93 2025
author: Olivie Blake
name: :)
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 43301955 Vagablonde is a darkly humorous, rollercoaster ride through the Los Angeles music scene about a woman who wants two things, the first is to live without psychotropic medication, and the second is to experience success as an artist. A cautionary tale about viral fame, Vagablonde speaks directly to our time in biting detail.

Prue Van Teesen is thriving. That is, her life looks good on paper. She has an easy government job, a nice girlfriend, and a budding music career. When Prue is introduced to producer Jax Jameson, they instantly click. Prue soon joins Jax in his “Kingdom,�� a collective of musicians and artists who share Prue’s aesthetic sensibilities and lust for escapism. Soon, she's off her meds, closing her law practice, and becoming entangled with a suspect crew of heavy drug users. But the group they form, Shiny AF, is starting to take off and Prue is on the precipice of getting everything she thought she wanted. So, why is she still so miserable?]]> 320 Anna Dorn 1951213009 :) 1 3.54 2020
author: Anna Dorn
name: :)
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2020
rating: 1
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 55867897
Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beach-side paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, Remy and Alicia tumble into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what “self-actualization�� looks like?

Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.]]> 320 Beth Morgan 0316704261 :) 3 3.26 2021
author: Beth Morgan
name: :)
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2021
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 60290773 The Devil Wears Prada meets The Assistants in this compulsively readable debut following a young woman who takes a job working for an enigmatic influencer and quickly discovers there’s a dark side to being a #girlboss.

After a series of go-nowhere jobs in the New York publishing world, Harper Cruz is broke, lonely, and desperate for a salary that won’t leave her scrambling to make rent each month. So when she stumbles across a job posting from an influencer offering triple her last paycheck, she automatically submits her résumé.

Harper may not be familiar with self-help guru Charlotte Green, but her relentless optimism and charismatic can-do spirit has created a cult-like following of women across the country. When she selects Harper among thousands of other applicants in less than twenty-four hours, it’s obvious she sees something she likes. Despite the pressure to accept the offer just as quickly as she’s been given it, Harper decides to take a leap of faith and become the newest member of The Greenhouse.

Accepting the job means a move to Nashville, and Harper is quickly dazzled by the glamorous world Charlotte has built in Music City. The Greenhouse is more than a workplace—it’s a family—and Harper soon finds herself swept into its inner circle. At first, she loves working in such an inspirational environment, where mandatory dance parties, daily intentions, and group bonding activities make up for long hours and Charlotte’s persistent demands for loyalty. But the deeper Harper is pulled into Charlotte’s world, the more she realizes that having it all and being it all comes with a price.]]> 320 Noelle Crooks :) 3 3.40 2023
author: Noelle Crooks
name: :)
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2023
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 58536026 Netflix's Inventing Anna and Hulu's The Dropout meets Catch Me If You Can, a captivating novel about an ambitious young woman who gets trapped in a charismatic con artist's scam.

After a rough year at NYU, aspiring writer Lora Ricci is thrilled to land a summer internship at ELLE magazine where she meets Cat Wolff, contributing editor and enigmatic daughter of a clean-energy mogul. Cat takes Lora under her wing, soliciting her help with side projects and encouraging her writing.

As a friendship emerges between the two women, Lora opens up to Cat about her desperate struggles and lost scholarship. Cat's solution: Drop out of NYU and become her ghostwriter. Lora agrees and, when the internship ends, she moves into Cat's suite at the opulent Plaza Hotel. Writing during the day and accompanying Cat to extravagant parties at night, Lora's life quickly shifts from looming nightmare to dream-come-true. But as Lora is drawn into Cat's glamorous lifestyle, Cat's perfect exterior cracks, exposing an illicit, shady world.

A whip-smart and delightfully inventive writer, Susan Rigetti brilliantly pieces together a perceptive, humorous caper full of sharp observations about scam culture. Composed of diary entries, emails, FBI correspondence, and more, Cover Story is a fresh, fun, and wholly original novel that takes readers deep into the codependency and deceit found in a relationship built on power imbalance and lies.]]> 368 Susan Rigetti 006307205X :) 3 3.69 2022
author: Susan Rigetti
name: :)
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 221754310
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story��

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 336 Dolly Alderton 0593686950 :) 3 3.69 2023
author: Dolly Alderton
name: :)
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 217388273 #1 NYT-bestselling YA author Renee Ahdieh's adult debut novel, about a young lawyer who gets pulled in to manage a crisis with her firm's biggest client, a family whose Korean beauty brand is worth a billion dollars, pitched as CRAZY RICH ASIANS meets SUCCESSION

Jia Song was always destined for greatness. As the daughter of Korean bodega owners, she promised herself that she would have every Fifth Avenue luxury when she grew up, and it is all within reach. She has just made junior partner at her prestigious Manhattan law firm, she has two best friends who are always there for her, and she is even about to score the ultra-luxe Birkin bag of her dreams. Sure, maybe her love life is in shambles and she’s spending too much time at the office. But she is set up to become the firm’s next star. So when her boss asks her for a Friday morning favor, sitting in on the hush-hush family implosion of a high-level client, she accepts without hesitation—only to find out that the client in question is one of the most famous Korean families in the world.

The Park family’s net worth is estimated at a billion dollars, and their mega-successful Korean beauty brand has shaped the culture for the past two decades. But the patriarch is filing for divorce while his wife is dying, and their three children can’t stop snapping at each other. With both the family fortune and legacy under threat from the worst kind of scandal, it’s up to Jia to set things right—and she only has a month to do it. Suddenly, Jia is thrust into the three Park siblings�� back-stabbing family politics and embroiled in a drama that feels straight out of a Korean soap opera. As Jia sorts through the lies and subterfuge, chasing the truth across the globe on private jets, she finds herself falling for this broken, badly-behaving family in ways she can’t quite explain. But it is also becoming all too clear that the Parks are hiding dark secrets, from themselves and from Jia. Can she separate the truth from the lies in time to protect the Parks�� fortune and secure her success at the firm? And can she hold on to what’s most important, even if it means admitting that what she always wanted isn’t what she actually needs?]]> 320 Renée Ahdieh 1250897955 :) 0 to-read 4.09 2025
author: Renée Ahdieh
name: :)
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 218153840 A young woman's radicalization sparks a widespread movement and media frenzy in this explosive novel of youthful passion, political awakening and first love, by an extraordinary new talent.

“A lush, cinematic and propulsive novel filled with sex, violence, glamor and a true revolutionary spirit. It’s a towering literary achievement.�� (Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize winner)

Corsica, 1993. As a sun-drenched Mediterranean summer heads into full swing, beautiful and brash seventeen-year-old Severine Guimard is counting down the days until graduation, dreaming of stardom while smoking cigarettes and seducing boys in her class to pass the time. The pampered French-American daughter of a politician, Severine knows she’s destined for bigger things.

That is, until one night, Severine is snatched off her bike by a militant trio fighting for Corsican independence and held for a large ransom. When the men fumble negotiating her release, the four become unlikely housemates deep in the island’s remote interior. Eager to gain the upper hand, Severine sets out to charm her captors, and soon, the handsome, intellectual leader, Bruno, the gentle university student, Tittu, and even the gruff, unflappable Petru grow to enjoy the company of their headstrong hostage.

As Severine is exposed to the group’s political philosophy, the ideas of Marx and Fanon begin to take root. With her flair for the spotlight and newfound beliefs, Severine becomes the face of a radical movement for a global TV audience. What follows is a summer of passion and terror, careening toward an inevitable, explosive conclusion, as Severine steps into the biggest role of her life.

The Bombshell is an electric novel filled with seduction and fervor as it explores the wonders and perils of youthful idealism, the combustibility of celebrity, and the sublime force of young love.]]> 416 Darrow Farr 0593833244 :) 0 to-read 4.25 2025
author: Darrow Farr
name: :)
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 127482608
It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior.]]> 400 Kiley Reid 0593328205 :) 3 3.32 2024
author: Kiley Reid
name: :)
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,�� chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.�� Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 192 Aysegül Savas 163973306X :) 3 3.88 2024
author: Aysegül Savas
name: :)
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 214269337 A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.

Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.

In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare—a leveret—that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton’s house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon by foxes, stoats, feral cats, raptors, and even people, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death.

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness first-hand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.]]> 285 Chloe Dalton 0593701844 :) 3 4.42 2025
author: Chloe Dalton
name: :)
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 213395554 A family saga following four generations on a time-bending journey from coastal Scotland to a colony on Mars.

Hannah is a fusion scientist working in a cottage off the coast of Scotland when she’s approached by a visitor from the future, a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backward through time to intervene in the fate of a warming planet.

Roban lives in the Colony, a sterile outpost of civilization, where he longs for the wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face down an uncertain future. Andrew believes there is still time for the human spirit to triumph. For his rationalist daughter Kenzie, such idealism is not enough to keep the rising floods at bay, so she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond.

In exploring the question “What if you could come back to the past and somehow change it with technology?�� Joe Mungo Reed has written an immersive story of hope, hubris, and sacrifice in the face of a frighteningly precarious present.]]> 256 Joe Mungo Reed 1324079371 :) 0 to-read 4.42
author: Joe Mungo Reed
name: :)
average rating: 4.42
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 203200544 112 Vincenzo Latronico 1804271055 :) 4 3.84 2022
author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: :)
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 60165461 New York Times), Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 announced Cho Nam-Joo as a major literary talent. In her signature sharp prose, brilliantly translated by Jamie Chang, Nam-Joo returns with this haunting account of a neglected housing complex in the shadows of Town: a former fishing village bought out by a massive conglomerate. Town is prosperous and safe—but only if you’re a citizen with “valuable skills and assets,�� which the residents of Saha Estates are not.

Disenfranchised and tightlipped, the Saha are forced into harsh labor, squatting in moldy units without electricity. Braiding the disparate experiences of the Saha residents—from the reluctant midwife to the unknowing test subject to the separated siblings—into a powerful Orwellian parable, Nam-Joo has crafted a heartbreaking tale of what happens when we finally unmask our oppressors.]]> 240 Cho Nam-Joo 132409088X :) 4 3.03 2019
author: Cho Nam-Joo
name: :)
average rating: 3.03
book published: 2019
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 57209888
Seventeen years pass without any resolution for those who knew and loved Hae-on, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover some of what she's lost, ultimately setting out to find the truth of what happened.

Told at different points in time from the perspectives of Da-on and two of Hae-on's classmates, Lemon loosely follows the structure of a detective novel. But finding the perpetrator is not the main objective here. Instead, the work explores grief and trauma, raising important questions about guilt, retribution, and the meaning of death and life.]]> 160 Kwon Yeo-Sun 163542089X :) 3 3.38 2019
author: Kwon Yeo-Sun
name: :)
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2019
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 210214266 Sister. Rival. Protector. The spellbinding story of a forgotten daughter and a forgotten goddess.

Quiet and reserved, Clemmie is happy in the background. But although her parents may overlook her talents, her ability to read hieroglyphs makes her invaluable at the Egyptian relic parties which have made her father the toast of Victorian society.

But at one such party, the words Clemmie interprets from an unusual amulet strike fear into her heart. The beautiful and dangerous glyphs she holds in her hands will change her life forever.

Five years later, Clemmie arrives in Egypt on a mission to save what remains of her family. The childhood game she used to play about the immortal sisters, Isis and Nephthys, has taken on a devastating resonance and it is only by following Nephthys' story that she can undo the mistakes of the past. On her journey up the Nile she will meet unexpected allies and enemies and, along with long-buried secrets and betrayals, Clemmie will be forced to step into the light.]]> 320 Rachel Louise Driscoll 1529924243 :) 3 3.86 2025
author: Rachel Louise Driscoll
name: :)
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> 198403445 A love story to climbing all the way down a book's rope, free diving to its bottom, and then resurfacing at its close, ready to breathe a different kind of air.

Nanako Hanada's life is in crisis. Recently separated from her husband, living in youth hostels and internet cafes, her work is going no better. Book sales at the eccentric Village Vanguard bookstore in Tokyo, which Nanako manages, are dwindling. Fallen out of love in all aspects of her life, Nanako realises how narrow her life has become, with no friends outside of her colleagues, and no hobbies apart from reading and arranging books.

That's when Nanako, in a bid to inject some excitement into her life, joins a meet-up site where people meet for 30-minute bursts to find romance, build a network, or just share ideas. She describes herself as a sexy bookseller who will give you a personalised book recommendation. In the year that follows, Nanako meets an eclectic range of strangers, some of whom wanted more than just a book, others she became real friends with.

Written with a subtle but sharp sense of humour, The Bookshop Woman is a heart-warming book about a bookseller's self-discovery. It offers a glimpse into bookselling in Japan and the quirky side of Tokyo and its people. Books, once again, offer inspiration and serve as channels for human communication.]]> 204 Nanako Hanada 1914240790 :) 3 3.58 2018
author: Nanako Hanada
name: :)
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2018
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 201072367 A symphony of interconnected lives that offers a compelling reflection on life in modern-day metropolises at the intersection of isolation and intimacy.

Set over several nights, between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., in and around Tokyo, this mind-blowingly constructed book is an elaborate, energetic fresco of human nocturnal existence in all its mystery, an enigmatic literary mix of Agatha Christie, Teju Cole, and Heironymous Bosch.

On this journey through the labyrinthine streets and hidden corners of one of the world’s most fascinating cities, everybody is searching for something, and maybe searching in the wrong places. Elements of the fantastical and the surreal abound, as they tend to do in the early pre-dawn hours of the morning, yet the settings, the human stories, and each character’s search are all as real as can be.

Goodnight Tokyo offers readers a unique and intimate take on Tokyo as seen through the eyes of a large cast of colorful characters. Their lives, as disparate and as far apart as they may seem, are in fact intricately interconnected and as their fates converge against the backdrop of the city’s neon-lit streets and quiet alleyways, Yoshida masterfully portrays in captivating, lyrical prose the complexities of human relationships, the mystery of human connection, and the universal quest for meaning.]]> 176 Atsuhiro Yoshida :) 3 3.55 2018
author: Atsuhiro Yoshida
name: :)
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2018
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 203648169 From the New York Times Notable author of The Old Woman with the Knife comes a bracingly original story of family, marriage and the cultural expectations of motherhood, about four women whose lives intersect in dramatic and unexpected ways at a government-run apartment complex outside Seoul.

When Yojin moves with her husband and daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she’s ready for a fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her neighbors, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next ten years.

Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as communal child care begins and the other parents show their true colors. Apartment Women traces the lives of four women in the apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs. Will they find a way to live peacefully? Or are the cultural expectations around parenthood stacked against them from the start?

A trenchant social novel from an award-winning author, Apartment Women incisively illuminates the unspoken imbalance of women’s parenting labor, challenging the age-old assumption that “it takes a village�� to raise a child.]]> 224 Gu Byeong-mo 1335050078 :) 3 3.42 2018
author: Gu Byeong-mo
name: :)
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2018
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 202489898 The startling first collection of dark, surreal, and unsettling stories from the international prize-winning author of The Woman in the Purple Skirt.

Asa tries to give her classmate a biscuit.
Nami evades her classmates' playground game of acorn-throwing.
Happy decides she's not interested in doing anything other than lying down on her sofa.

Each of these three stories begins in a reasonable place-but by the end you'll find yourself in another world altogether.]]> 191 Natsuko Imamura 0571384137 :) 3 3.45 2020
author: Natsuko Imamura
name: :)
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2020
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 209628245 Welcome to Tenderness!

A quaint seaside town in Kitakyushu, Mojiko is full of hidden delights. And one unexpected treasure is the 24/7 convenience store, Tenderness.

At first glance, it’s a store like any other.

Sure, it’s a bit odd that the handsome manager has his own fan club. And perhaps the customers are somewhat eccentric. But there’s a warmth about Tenderness that draws you in.

The bright lights are always on. The employees know you by name. And the shelves are stacked with delicious treats, from strong hot coffee to sweet parfaits, egg sandos to ramen, crispy fried chicken to refreshing soba.

After a while, you get the feeling that whatever you need might just be waiting for you here��

Celebrating the joy of connection and community, The Convenience Store by the Sea is the heartwarming international bestseller from award-winning Japanese novelist Sonoko Machida.]]> 304 Sonoko Machida 1398722782 :) 2 3.77 2020
author: Sonoko Machida
name: :)
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2020
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 215369044 For lovers of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, a new book about the beauty of humble objects, the power of writing, and reconnecting with those you have lost.

Write your story, heal your heart . . .

Hidden away in a corner of the Ginza neighbourhood is a venerable stationery shop. To venture inside is to find everything your stationery-loving heart desires, from the most delicate paper to fountain pens that fit exactly to the shape of your hand to gorgeously coloured inks. The shop owner intuits your every need, inviting you to take a seat at a small wooden table on the top floor, where you'll find the words flowing, helping you unlock repressed memories, secret longings and your own mysteries.

To this shop comes a young company employee, uncertain in his career and needing a connection back to his past; the hostess of an elegant club; the vice-captain of a high-school archery team, an ageing businessman and a formerly homeless sushi chef. With impeccable manners and a warm demeanour, the shop owner helps each of them with more than just their stationery needs.]]> 320 Kenji Ueda 1786584646 :) 3 3.79 2022
author: Kenji Ueda
name: :)
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 178632549 In a small seaside town, autumn is edging into winter, gulls ride winds over the waves, and two women, pass each other on the promenade, as yet unaware of each other's existence.

In the nineties Lydia was a teen pop star, posed half naked on billboards everywhere with a lollipop between her lips and no idea how to live, letting the world happen to her. Now, three decades later, Lydia is less and less sure that what happened to her was in the least bit okay. The news cycle runs hot with #MeToo stories, and a famous former lover has emerged with a self-serving apology, asking her to forgive him. Suddenly, the past is full of trapdoors she is desperately trying not to fall through.

Joyce, in middle age, has never left home. She still lives with her mother Betty. With their matching dresses, identical hairdos and makeup, they are the local oddballs. Theirs is a life of unerring routine: the shops, biscuits served on bone china plates, dressing up for a gin and tonic on Saturday. Nice things. One misstep from Joyce can ruin Betty's day; so Joyce treads carefully. She has never let herself think about a different kind of life. But recently, along with the hot flushes, something like anger is asserting itself, like a caged thing realising it should probably try and escape.

Amid the grey skies, amusement parks and beauty parlours of a gentrifying run-down seaside resort, these two women might never meet. But as they both try to untangle the damaging details of their past in the hope of a better future, their lives are set on an unlikely collision course.

With mordant wit and lyrical prose, Birding asks if we can ever see ourselves clearly or if we are always the unreliable narrators of our own experiences. It is a story about the difference between responsibility and obligation, unhealthy relationships and abusive ones, third acts and last chances, and two women trying to take flight on clipped wings.]]> 271 Rose Ruane 1472157982 :) 3 3.76 2024
author: Rose Ruane
name: :)
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 213570821 From the bestselling author of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and Midnight is the Darkest Hour comes a chilling, compulsive story of five amateur sleuths, whose hunt for an elusive killer catapults them into danger as the world watches.

It's the most famous crime in modern history. But only she knows the true story.

After the unexpected death of her father, college student Jane Sharp longs for a distraction from her grief. She becomes obsessed with true crime, befriending armchair detectives who teach her how to hunt killers from afar. In this morbid internet underground, Jane finds friendship, purpose, and even glory...

So when news of the shocking deaths of three college girls in Delphine, Idaho takes the world by storm, and sleuths everywhere race to solve the crimes, Jane and her friends are determined to beat them. But the case turns out to be stranger than anyone expected. Details don't add up, the police are cagey, and there seems to be more media hype and internet theorizing than actual evidence. When Jane and her sleuths take a step closer, they find that every answer only begs more questions. Something's not adding up, and they begin to suspect their killer may be smarter and more prolific than any they've faced before. Placing themselves in the center of the story starts to feel more and more like walking into a trap...

Told one year after the astounding events that concluded the case and left the world reeling, when Jane has finally decided to break her silence about what really happened, she tells the true story of the Delphine Massacres. And what she has to confess will shock even the most seasoned true crime fans...


]]> 480 Ashley Winstead 1728270006 :) 3 3.74 2025
author: Ashley Winstead
name: :)
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 211178725 The woman never goes by the same name.
She never stays in the same place too long.
She never ages. She never dies.
But those around her do.

When two grieving strangers meet by chance in Osaka airport they uncover a disturbing connection. Jake's best friend and Mariko's twin brother each died, 6,000 miles apart, in brutal and unfathomable circumstances.

Each encountered a mesmerising, dark-haired woman in the days before their deaths. A woman who came looking for Mariko - and then disappeared.

Jake, who has carried his loss and guilt for a decade, finds himself compelled to follow the trail set by Mariko's revelations. It's a trail that weaves across continents and centuries, leading back to the many who have died - in strange and terrifying and eerily similar ways - and those they left behind: bewildered, disbelieved, yet resolutely sure of what they saw.

And, at the centre of it all, there is the same beguiling woman. Her name may have changed, but her purpose has never wavered, and as Jake races to discover who, or what she is, she has already made her next choice.

But will knowing her secret be enough to stop her?]]> 352 Susan Barker 0593718291 :) 3 3.78 2025
author: Susan Barker
name: :)
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 219521090 A publishing event ten years in the making��a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists��the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until �� betrayed and brokenhearted �� she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America �� but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X :) 4 3.97 2025
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: :)
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 382 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 :) 3 4.66 2025
author: Suzanne Collins
name: :)
average rating: 4.66
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> 216541832 Driven by past traumas and present hardships, two women face off over home turf in this twisty psychological thriller from Rebecca Hanover, author of The Last Applicant.

Emily Hawthorne lives in the well-heeled Noe Valley of San Francisco…but just barely. With less work than she would like at the yoga studio, a pile of debt, and a fraught past, she can no longer afford her tiny condo. When she meets the charming Penelope “Pip�� Stone and her young daughter, also beset by financial woes, she agrees to take them in as roommates.

But Emily’s stroke of luck turns out to be another twist of the Pip is a professional squatter who has no intention of paying rent. And Pip doesn’t want to share the condo.

She wants the whole thing.

Their domestic standoff only intensifies when a downstairs neighbor is murdered. Both women become suspects, not to mention each other’s mistrustful alibis.

Emily feels the walls closing in. Is she trapped with a vulnerable grifter—who, like her, may have good reasons for making bad decisions—or is Pip just a cold-blooded killer?]]> 267 Rebecca Hanover 1662509316 :) 2 3.62 2025
author: Rebecca Hanover
name: :)
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2025
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 218155619
Now, five years later, Anna is weary. Where art school was boundless creativity and collaboration, the New York art scene is all about survival. Worse: Willow’s true nature as a muse only to herself has become nakedly apparent, as has her cruelty.

So the mugging Anna has staged for Willow this morning? It’s supposed to send Willow running back to her true friend. The knife is supposed to be a mirror in which this ‘artist�� can finally see the monster she’s become. It’s supposed to give Anna her power back.

But this morning isn’t just any Tuesday. It’s September 11, 2001. And as the city reels from the seismic events of that day, Willow never returns home. Anna keeps quiet about the prank and her growing panic that she’s to blame for Willow’s disappearance. But as the hours and days tick by, Anna begins to question whether she’s the mastermind she thought she was, or the pawn.

Alternating between the friends' art school tenure and their lives in 2001 New York, Tell Them You Lied reveals how difficult the search for answers is when you'd rather have anything but the truth.]]> 384 Laura Leffler 1368103766 :) 0 to-read 3.81 2025
author: Laura Leffler
name: :)
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 220458657 Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches��: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.

In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.

Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.]]> 368 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0593874323 :) 0 to-read 4.37 2025
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: :)
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 207293815 In this exquisite speculative novel set in a world where white people no longer exist, college professor Charlie Brunton receives a call from his estranged daughter Sidney, setting off a chain of events as they journey across a truly “post-racial�� America in search of answers.

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charles Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old who watched her white mother and step-family drown themselves in the lake behind their house.

Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across America headed for Alabama, where Sidney believes she may still have some family left. But neither Sidney or Charlie is prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

When they enter the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.]]> 304 Cebo Campbell 1668034921 :) 3 3.82 2024
author: Cebo Campbell
name: :)
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 69705106
*Ana Reyes, New York Times bestselling author of The House in the Pines

Twenty years ago, the members of a reclusive commune outside Philadelphia vanished without a trace. The mystery of their disappearance has never been solved. No sightings of the members were ever verified, and no bodies ever found. But the group did leave one thing behind: a twelve-year-old girl wandering alone on the side of the road in search of her lost family.

In the years since that morning, Lee Burton has tried to put the pain of her past behind her. She has built a new identity for herself, with a doting husband and seven-month-old daughter, Lucy. No one in her life now knows about her connection to “the cult that went missing,�� not even her husband. But new motherhood is proving a bigger challenge than she anticipated. She doesn't want to let Lucy out of her sight even for a moment. She can't return to work. She's not sleeping, and she's starting to have paranoid thoughts of Lucy being harmed.

Then a stranger shows up on her doorstep, offering to finally answer all of Lee’s questions about her past—if she could only trust that the woman is who she says she is. As she digs deeper into the woman's history, the safe, stable life that Lee has constructed for herself threatens to shatter. In The Ascent, Allison Buccola has crafted a nerve-rattling thriller about motherhood, identity, and the truths we think we know about our families.]]> 352 Allison Buccola 0593730003 :) 0 to-read 4.23 2025
author: Allison Buccola
name: :)
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 214151301 Set over the course of one day, a heart-racing story about a woman facing the unimaginable, determined to find safety

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, she realizes there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. She’s determined to change her life if she can just make it home.]]> 229 Emma Pattee 1668055473 :) 3 3.83 2025
author: Emma Pattee
name: :)
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
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]]> 214151277 336 Paul Rudnick 166806829X :) 2 3.58 2025
author: Paul Rudnick
name: :)
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
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]]> 215748787 Rule One: Travel can only occur to a point within your lifetime.
Rule Two: You can only travel for ninety seconds.
Rule Three: You can only observe.
The rules cannot be broken.

In this riveting science fiction novel from acclaimed author Philip Fracassi, a scientist has unlocked the mysteries of time travel. This is not the story you think you know. And the rules are only the beginning.

Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She's built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time—to any point in the traveler's lifetime—and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it's not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe.

After Beth's husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella—their only daughter—and continue the work they started. Mired in grief and threatened by her ruthless CEO, Beth pushes herself to the limit to prove the value of her technology.

Then the impossible happens. Simply viewing personal history should not alter the present, but with each new observation she makes, her own timeline begins to warp.

As her reality constantly shifts, Beth must solve the puzzles of her past, even if it means forsaking her future.]]> 336 Philip Fracassi 0316572519 :) 4 3.68 2025
author: Philip Fracassi
name: :)
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 207611566 There’s power in a book��

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who knows she’s going to go home and marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

In Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, the author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group delivers another searing, completely original novel and further cements his status as a “horror master�� (NPR).]]> 482 Grady Hendrix 0593548981 :) 3 4.02 2025
author: Grady Hendrix
name: :)
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 217387959 Dark Matter meets Girl, Interrupted in this gripping psychological thriller about a young woman teetering on the edge of reality.

Virginia 1954. When a young woman wakes on a patient transport bus arriving at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, she remembers nothing of her life before that moment, none of the dark things she must’ve seen and done that forged her into the skillful and cunning fighter she is. Doctors tell her she’s Dorothy Frasier, a paranoid schizophrenic, committed by the state for her violent delusions. She’s certain they’re wrong �� until disturbing visions of a dystopian future in which frantic scientists urge her to complete “the mission�� and save mankind begin to invade her reality.

Believing it’s Hanover causing the hallucinations, she tells no one and focuses only on escaping �� until there’s a visitor. A man whose loving face �� and touch �� she remembers, a man who knows all about her visions, because he’s spent years helping her cope with them: her husband, Paul Frasier.

Now she’s sure of nothing, caught between two realities. Believe in the future, and she might save the world. Believe in her husband and doctors�� plans for her treatment, and she might save herself. She needs answers, but to get them, she’ll have to face the darkness inside her and use it as she risks her freedom, mind, and ultimately her life in a heart-stopping quest for the truth.]]> 384 Melissa Pace 1250358671 :) 0 to-read 4.10
author: Melissa Pace
name: :)
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 :) 3 4.32 2025
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: :)
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 211399774 Two former serial killers trying to keep their past buried realize that old habits die hard in this “wildly original, razor-sharp thriller�� (Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestsellingauthor of All the Colors of the Dark).

I wasn't smashing the patriarchy; I was killing it. Literally.

Hazel and Fox are an ordinary married couple with a baby. Except for one small thing: they're murderers. Well, they used to be. They had it all. An enviable London lifestyle, five-star travels, and plenty of bad men to rid from the world. Then Hazel got pregnant.

Now, they’re just another mom-and-dad-and-baby. They gave up vigilante justice for life in the suburbs: arranged play dates instead of body disposals, diapers over daggers, mommy conversations instead of the sweet seduction right before a kill. Hazel finds her new life terribly dull. And the more she forces herself to play her monotonous, predictable role, the more she begins to feel that murderous itch again.

Meanwhile, Fox has really taken to being a father. Always the planner, he loves being five steps ahead of everyone and knowing exactly what’s coming around the bend. Plus, if anyone can understand Hazel needing one more kill, it’s Fox. But then Hazel kills someone without telling Fox. And when police show up at their door, Hazel realizes it will take everything she has to keep her family together.]]> 352 Asia Mackay 0593875583 :) 3 3.60 2025
author: Asia Mackay
name: :)
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 213344051 From the acclaimed author of The Kindest Lie, a propulsive novel about a mother and daughter each seeking justice and following their dreams during moments of social reckoning��1960s Nashville and 1992 Chicago—perfect for readers of Brit Bennett and Tayari Jones.

Two women. Two pivotal moments. One dream for justice and equality.

It’s 1959, and Freda Gilroy has just arrived at Nashville’s Fisk University, eager to begin her studies and uphold the tradition of Black Excellence instilled in her by her parents back home in Chicago. Coming from an upper-middle-class lifestyle where Black and white people lived together in relative harmony, Freda is surprised to discover the menace of racism down South. When a chance encounter with an intriguing young man draws her into the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Freda finds herself caught between two worlds, and two loves, and must decide how much she’s willing to sacrifice in the name of justice, equality, and the advancement of her people.

In 1992 Chicago, Freda’s daughter Tulip is an ambitious PR professional on track for a big promotion, if workplace politics and racial microaggressions don’t get in her way. With the ruling in the Rodney King trial weighing heavily on her, Tulip feels increasingly agitated and decides she can no longer stay quiet. Called to action by a series of glaring injustices, Tulip makes an irreversible professional misstep as she seeks to uplift her community. Will she find the courage to veer off the “safe�� path and follow her heart, just as her mother had three decades prior?

Insightful, evocative, and richly imagined with stories of hidden history, People of Means is an emotional tour de force that offers a glimpse into the quest for racial equality, the pursuit of personal and communal success, and the power of love and family ties.]]> 368 Nancy Johnson 0063157519 :) 4 3.99 2025
author: Nancy Johnson
name: :)
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
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]]> 216247502
Arriving at the University of Edinburgh for her first term, Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her. She believes she’ll find the answer here in Scotland, where an old friend of her father’s—now a famous writer known as Lord Lennox—lives. When she is invited to spend the weekend at Lord Lennox’s centuries-old estate with his enveloping, fascinating family, Pen begins to unravel her parents�� secret, just as she’s falling in love for the first time . . .

As Pen experiences the sharp shock of adulthood, she comes to rely on herself for the first time in her life. A rich and rewarding novel of campus life, of sexual awakening, and ultimately, of the many ways women can become mothers in this world, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus asks to what extent we need to look back in order to move forward.]]> 384 Emma Knight 0593830458 :) 3 3.41
author: Emma Knight
name: :)
average rating: 3.41
book published:
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
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]]> 215362651 “The story of relationships built and broken, mistakes inherited and repeated, and the beauty of trying again��.already one of the year’s best.”��People

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws�� lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, though Cece can’t imagine anyone more ill-suited for the task—an airport baggage handler haunted by a tragedy from his and Charlie’s shared past. But as Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. And why does Garrett, after meeting Cece, begin to feel, well, human again? As a contagious stomach flu threatens to scuttle the wedding, and Charlie and Garrett’s friendship is put to the ultimate test, Cece must decide between the life she’s dreamed of and a life she’s never imagined.

The events of that summer have long-lasting repercussions, not only on the three friends caught in its shadow but also on their children, who struggle to escape their parents�� story. Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past—both our own and the ones we’ve inherited.

Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.]]> 448 Eric Puchner 0385550669 :) 2 3.65 2025
author: Eric Puchner
name: :)
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
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]]> 213618132 The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.

The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.

So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.

In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.]]> 368 Charmaine Wilkerson 0593358368 :) 4 4.06 2025
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: :)
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
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]]> 214537798 From the author of instant national bestseller Love & Saffron, this bright and comforting novel follows the surprising friendship between two young women in 1990s Seattle and Paris, illuminating the power of books to change our lives.

A buoyant, mouth-watering oasis of a novel, Kate & Frida is a love letter to bookshops and booksellers, to the way stories shape how we perceive ourselves, to the passion we bring to life in our twenties, and to the last precious years before the internet changed everything.

Twenty-something Frida Rodriguez comes to Paris in 1991, relishing the city’s butter-soaked cuisine and seeking her future as a war correspondent. But when she writes to a bookshop in Seattle, she receives more than just the book she requests. A friendship begins that will redefine the person she thought she wanted to become. 

Seattle bookseller Kate Fair is transformed by Frida’s free spirit, spurred to kiss her handsome coworker, to believe in herself as a writer, and to find beauty even in loss. Through the most tumultuous years of their young lives—personally and globally—Kate and Frida’s friendship sustains and nourishes them as they show each other how to overcome self-doubt and the necessity of embracing joy even through our darkest hours.]]> 288 Kim Fay 0593852389 :) 3 4.11 2025
author: Kim Fay
name: :)
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 213558038 From one of the most beloved comedic writers of our time comes a charming, laugh-out-loud tale of love and criminality, a pitch-perfect romantic comedy from the author of Ms. Demeanor.

Taking over her parents�� estate sale business is more than Emma Lewis bargained for. Coming from a long line of estate liquidators has its challenges but Emma was completely unprepared for the people she would meet. Pimps, prostitutes, crooked cops, art thieves? Should she turn down potential clients in need of decluttering just because they are shady and proud of it?

No.

A girl must make a living—and it could be more fortuitous than she ever imagined . . . ]]> 312 Elinor Lipman 0063322250 :) 2 3.38 2025
author: Elinor Lipman
name: :)
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 213344055 A disillusioned tech executive goes into an obsessive spiral when her best friend—and longtime crush—is implicated in a woman’s death.

Edie Walker’s life is not going as planned. At thirty-five she feels stuck: in her career, in her love life, and in her tiny San Francisco studio apartment. It doesn’t help that her best friend, Peter Masterson, is basically the über successful male version of her—and she’s hopelessly, unrequitedly in love with him. But when Peter breaks up with his girlfriend of seven years, Edie thinks her life might finally be turning around. He’ll discover how toxic dating-app culture is and realize Edie has been right for him all along.

Except Peter almost immediately lands a date with Anaya Thomas, a gorgeous, whip-smart professor and writer of feminist literature whom even Edie—reared in the culture of tech bros—is smitten by. Unlike the women Peter has dated before, Anaya is like an alternative-reality version of Edie—one with shampoo-commercial hair and a meaningful career, who definitely doesn’t spend her weekends scrolling social media alone in her apartment. It’s only a matter of time before Peter falls head over heels for this woman; Edie herself is infatuated after one meeting.

Then Anaya is found dead in her apartment—right after a date with Peter.]]> 272 Emily J. Smith 006338583X :) 1 3.33 2025
author: Emily J. Smith
name: :)
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 215217614 A beautiful con artist insinuates herself into a wealthy socialite’s life . . . with deadly consequences, in this serpentine thriller about identity and obsession, from actress, director and bestselling author Krysten Ritter.

 Liz Dawson weaves through a crowd with the ease of a tropical breeze, moving seamlessly through elite circles, sparking instant connections and making every new acquaintance feel like an intimate friend. She’s clever, smooth, and confident—qualities that make her a brilliant serial con artist.

Isabelle Beresford is strikingly beautiful, obscenely wealthy, and the new owner of Casa Esmerelda, a fabulous villa on the Mexican coast—attributes that make her the perfect mark. When she offers Liz a job handling the installation of a piece of art in her otherwise vacant home, Liz can’t resist the allure of a beach retreat. She longs for a reset, a chance to finally shed the grip of her addiction to the conning game.

But when Liz, with her lush dark hair and intense green eyes, is mistaken for Isabelle herself, Liz can’t help effortlessly slipping into the socialite’s identity. The transition is so easeful, it almost feels like fate. But just who is Isabelle Beresford really, and why does she seem to have abandoned this stunning life of hers?

As Liz insinuates herself deeper into the dazzling—and deceptive—world of the Punta Mita resort community, she draws closer to the dangers surrounding the real Isabelle. Dangers that may have already ensnared Liz, too. This might not be the con of her life—but the con that ends it.]]> 272 Krysten Ritter 0063334607 :) 3 3.80 2025
author: Krysten Ritter
name: :)
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
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]]> 214151232 A highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea that tells the story of three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—as they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.

Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.

On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he’s unlike anything she’s seen before.

While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun’s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.]]> 391 Silvia Park 1668021668 :) 3 3.95 2025
author: Silvia Park
name: :)
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> 213395442 A young woman’s seasonal job takes a dark, surreal turn in this vivid and surprising debut.

When Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, all she knows about harvesting sugar beets (Beta vulgaris) is that her paycheck will cover a few months�� rent on their Brooklyn apartment. She’ll try anything to escape the incessant debt collection calls—and chronic anxieties about her body and her relationship. But as the grueling graveyard shifts set in, Elise notices strange threatening texts, a mysterious rash, a string of disappearances from the workers�� campsite, and snatches of a hypnotic voice coming from the beet pile itself.

As crewmembers vanish, Elise obsesses over Tom’s closeness with their charismatic coworker Cee and falls back on self-destructive patterns of disordered eating and dissociation. Against the horrors of her uncertain future, is the siren song of the beet pile almost . . . appealing? Biting and eerie, Beta Vulgaris harnesses an audacious premise to undermine straightforward narratives of class, trauma, consumption, and redemption.]]> 296 Margie Sarsfield 1324078731 :) 4 3.58 2025
author: Margie Sarsfield
name: :)
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
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]]> 223524394
When We Love You, Bunny opens, Sam has just published her first novel to critical acclaim. But at a New England stop on her book tour, her one-time frenemies, furious at the way they’ve been portrayed, kidnap her. Now a captive audience, it’s her (and our) turn to hear the Bunnies�� side of the story. One by one, they take turns holding the axe, and recount the birth throes of their unholy alliance, their discovery of their unusual creative powers—and the phantasmagoric adventure of conjuring their first creation. With a bound and gagged Sam, we embark on a wickedly intoxicating journey into the heart of dark academia: a fairy tale slasher that explores the wonder and horror of creation itself. Not to mention the transformative powers of love and friendship, Bunny.

Frankenstein by way of Heathers, We Love You, Bunny is both a prequel and a sequel, and an unabashedly wild and totally complete stand-alone novel. Open your hearts, Bunny, to another dazzlingly original and darkly hilarious romp in the Bunny-verse from the queen of the fever-dream, Mona Awad.]]> 496 Mona Awad 1668098482 :) 0 to-read 4.12 2025
author: Mona Awad
name: :)
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213656341 This stunning debut novel set in the fascinating world of Cold War Soviet ballet follows the fates of twin sisters whose bond is competitive, complicated, but never broken.

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. But a new law from the Kremlin upends Maya and Natasha’s due to fears of defection, family members may no longer travel abroad together. The Kirov can only accept one of them.

Maya, long accustomed to living in her sister’s shadow, accepts her bitter fate, until a new dance partner inspires her to dream bigger and practice harder. For the first time—and at the cruelest possible moment—the sisters are equally matched. And then one sister betrays the other, altering their lives forever and splitting them in two, though neither will stray far from the other’s orbit.

As one of the twins pursues her ballet career and experiences a world outside Russia for the first time, the other is cast in an epic film adaptation of War and Peace, produced and financed by the Soviet State. As the Cold War heats up, Maya and Natasha must confront their to East versus West; to the government that saved them versus their dreams of freedom; and, always, to each other.


]]> 384 Elyse Durham 0063393611 :) 4 3.99 2025
author: Elyse Durham
name: :)
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 220160455 In this delightfully funny and heartfelt new novel from the author of the “bittersweet page-turner�� (The New York Times) The Last Book Party, an American woman travels to the English countryside when she discovers tickets her late mother had purchased for a murder mystery simulation in a small British town.

When thirty-four-year-old Cath loses her mostly absentee mother, she is ambivalent. With days of quiet, unassuming routine in Buffalo, New York, Cath consciously avoids the impulsive, thrill-seeking lifestyle that her mother once led. But when she’s forced to go through her mother’s things one afternoon, Cath is perplexed to find tickets for an upcoming “murder week�� in England’s Peak. A whole town has come together to stage a fake murder mystery to attract tourism to their quaint hamlet. Baffled but helplessly intrigued by her mother’s secret purchase, Cath decides to go on the trip herself—and begins a journey she never could have anticipated.

Teaming up with her two cottage-mates, both ardent mystery lovers—Wyatt Green, forty, who works unhappily in his husband’s birding store, and Amity Clark, fifty, a divorced romance writer struggling with her novels—Cath sets about solving the “crime�� and begins to unravel shocking truths about her mother along the way. Amidst a fling—or something more—with the handsome local maker of artisanal gin, Cath and her irresistibly charming fellow sleuths will find this week of fake murder may help them face up to a very real crossroads in their own lives.

Witty, wise, and deliciously escapist, Welcome to Murder Week is a fresh, inventive twist on the murder mystery and a touching portrayal of one daughter’s reckoning with her grief, her past—and her own budding sense of adventure.]]> 304 Karen Dukess 1668079771 :) 0 to-read 4.35 2025
author: Karen Dukess
name: :)
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 219520677 From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times best seller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends�� secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.]]> 352 Leila Mottley 0593801121 :) 0 to-read 4.21 2025
author: Leila Mottley
name: :)
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49933298 ‘I mean who cares about opinions, gossip, whatever, when bodies are so vulnerable, in search only of love and breath.��

The body frequently escapes her, but is always very much present in these compellingly vivid, clear-eyed essays on an embodied self in flight through the world, from the brilliant young writer Ellena Savage.

In Portuguese police stations and Portland college campuses, in suburban Melbourne libraries and wintry Berlin apartments, Savage shows bodies in pain and in love, bodies at work and at rest.

She circles back to scenes of crimes or near-crimes, to lovers or near-lovers, to turn over the stones, reread the paperwork, check the deeds, approach from another angle altogether. These essays traverse cities and spaces, bodies and histories, moving through forms and modes to find a closer kind of truth. Blueberries is ripe with acid, promise, and sweetness.]]> 256 Ellena Savage 1912854678 :) 3 3.53 2020
author: Ellena Savage
name: :)
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 174156085 Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic.

It is the twilight of Europe’s bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and be discreet.

In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother's terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women—and they cross a threshold from which there’s no turning back.

With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.]]> 256 Marina Yuszczuk 0593472063 :) 3 3.43 2020
author: Marina Yuszczuk
name: :)
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2020
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 199295788 In this charming and emotionally resonant follow up to the internationally bestselling Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi Yagisawa paints a poignant and thoughtful portrait of life, love, and how much books and bookstores mean to the people who love them.

Set again in the beloved Japanese bookshop and nearby coffee shop in the Jimbocho neighborhood of Toyko, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop deepens the relationship between Takako, her uncle Satoru , and the people in their lives. A new cast of heartwarming regulars have appeared in the shop, including an old man who wears the same ragged mouse-colored sweater and another who collects books solely for the official stamps with the author’s personal seal.

Satoshi Yagisawa illuminates the everyday relationships between people that are forged and grown through a shared love of books. As time passes, Satoru, with Takako’s help, must choose whether to keep the bookshop open or shutter its doors forever. Making the decision will take uncle and niece on an emotional journey back to their family’s roots and remind them again what a bookstore can mean to an individual, a neighborhood, and a whole culture.]]> 176 Satoshi Yagisawa 0063278715 :) 4 3.90 2011
author: Satoshi Yagisawa
name: :)
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2011
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 203469691
It is already a haven of tranquility and reflection for locals, but when someone leaves a notebook behind, the laundromat becomes a place that brings people together. One by one, customers start jotting down candid diary entries, opening their hearts and inviting acts of kindness from neighbours who were once just faces in the crowd.

But there is more to the diary than first appears, and before long the laundromat's regulars are teaming up to solve a mystery and help the notebook's former owner find peace.]]> 320 Kim Jiyun 1529437431 :) 3 3.93 2023
author: Kim Jiyun
name: :)
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 216785385 If you could swap your life for a better one, which would you choose?

On the outskirts of Rainbow Town, there is an old, abandoned house. They say that if you send a letter detailing your misfortunes there, you could receive a ticket. If you bring this ticket to the house on the first day of the rainy season, you'll be granted entrance into the mysterious Rainfall Market—where you can choose to completely change your life.

No one is more surprised than Serin when she receives a ticket. Lonely and with no real prospects for a future, Serin ventures to the market, determined to create a better life for herself.

There, she meets a magical cat companion named Issha and they search through bookstores, perfumeries, and fantastical realms while Serin tries to determine what her perfect life will look like.

The catch? Serin only has one week to find her happiness or be doomed to vanish into the market forever.

And all the while, a shadow follows quietly behind them…]]> 206 You Yeong-Gwang 0593952669 :) 4 3.48 2023
author: You Yeong-Gwang
name: :)
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 207747741
But the Company District is not quite what she expected, it hides the darker underbelly of the magical industry that Penny thought she was a part of.

Penny discovers the Civil Complaint Center, full of people filing complaints about their dreams. She also learns about the regular customers who have stopped coming to the store. As she gets to the bottom of each complaint, she begins to expand her horizons, transforming from just selling dreams to understanding what lies in the hearts of their lost regulars.

Return to the DallerGut Dream Department Store delves deeper into the dream industry and its customers. Why do some of them buy a dream and never return? Will Penny and her colleagues be able to bring their regulars back?]]> 272 Lee Mi-ye 1035412780 :) 3 4.06 2021
author: Lee Mi-ye
name: :)
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 205673377 From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.]]> 288 Hiromi Kawakami 1593766114 :) 3 3.76 2016
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: :)
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2016
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 219300660 From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.

Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre and troubling effect. Her depictions of a happily unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman convinced she is an alien in Earthlings have endeared her to millions of readers worldwide. Vanishing World takes Murata’s universe to a bold new level, imagining an alternative Japan where attitudes to sex and procreation are wildly different to our own.

As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated�� in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system�� by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage—sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest—Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only “Kodomo-chan.�� Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?]]> 240 Sayaka Murata 0802164668 :) 2 3.53 2015
author: Sayaka Murata
name: :)
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2015
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 224070664
For fans of Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder and Lisa Taddeo's Animal, Shy Girl is a harrowing tale of girlhood, survival, autonomy, and revenge.]]> 247 Mia Ballard :) 4 4.02 2025
author: Mia Ballard
name: :)
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 215217589 Darkly funny and provocative, this edge-of-your-seat thrill ride follows two unlikely fugitives—an SAT tutor who finds her rich employers brutally murdered and the bound woman she frees from their mansion—an irresistible debut novel perfect for fans of The Guest�����Ի���My Sister, the Serial Killer

A scholarship kid with straight As and big dreams, Evie Gordon always thought she was special, that she’d be someone. But after graduating from an elite university, she finds herself drowning in debt and working as an SAT tutor for the super-rich of Los Angeles.

Everything changes one Sunday, when she arrives for her weekly lesson at the Victors�� Beverly Hills estate and, in lieu of a bored teenager, finds the bloody remains of the parents strewn through their beautiful back garden, and a woman crying for help within a closet. As Evie works to free her, the two are spotted—and within moments, they go from bystanders to suspects to fugitives.

Suddenly at the heart of a manhunt and accompanied by a mysterious woman who refuses to speak, Evie knows the only way to clear her name is to find the real killer. But first she’ll have to break down the barriers of her companion, who is quickly becoming the most important person in Evie’s upside-down life. Their breathless spree takes them across the U.S. as developments in the case shock the nation and the press runs wild with Evie’s a gifted kid turned killer. She's now on the cover of every magazine and newspaper—anointed the new Charles Manson, a bloodthirsty ninety-nine percenter looking to start a class war. Evie is finally someone.

By turns cuttingly hilarious and deeply insightful, Killer Potential is a strikingly original debut. A literary novel with the page-turning intensity of a thriller that asks timely questions about our belief in the romance of social mobility, and how the stories we’re sold about our potential can shape the course of our lives.]]> 320 Hannah Deitch 0063356481 :) 1 3.53 2025
author: Hannah Deitch
name: :)
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> 217463459 A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST DEBUT OF 2025

Mairéad works all hours in a run-down West End theatre’s wardrobe department, her whole existence made up of threads and needles, running errands to mend shoes, fixing broken zips and handwashing underwear. She must also do her best to avoid groping hands backstage and the terrible bullying of the show’s producer.

But, despite her skill and growing experience, half of Mairéad remains in her windy, hedge-filled home in Ireland, and the life she abandoned there. In noughties London, she has the potential to be somebody completely new �� why, then, does she feel so stuck? Between the bustling side streets of Soho, and the wet grass of Leitrim and Donegal, Mairéad is caught, running from the girl she was but unable to reveal the woman she’d hoped to become.

Told with rare honesty and equal measures of warmth and bite, The Wardrobe Department is a story about reckoning with the past, finding the courage to change the present �� and asking what comes next.]]> 231 Elaine Garvey 1837260184 :) 1 3.50
author: Elaine Garvey
name: :)
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
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