en-US Fri, 14 Feb 2025 07:14:33 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 223478303
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.]]> Mona Awad Stef 0 to-read 4.57 2025
author: Mona Awad
name: Stef
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2025
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date added: 2025/02/14
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]]> 7244 The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.]]> 546 Barbara Kingsolver 0060786507 Stef 0 to-read 4.10 1998
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Stef
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/12
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]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Stef 0 to-read 4.52 2025
author: John Green
name: Stef
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> 211004179 For fans of Jordan Peele’s films, Stranger Things, and The Other Black Girl, Listen To Your Sister is a laugh-out-loud, deeply terrifying, and big-hearted speculative horror novel from electrifying debut talent Neena Viel.

Twenty-five year old Calla Williams is struggling since becoming guardian to her brother, Jamie. Calla is overwhelmed and tired of being the one who makes sacrifices to keep the family together. Jamie, full of good-natured sixteen-year-old recklessness, is usually off fighting for what matters to him or getting into mischief, often at the same time. Dre, their brother, promised he would help raise Jamie–but now the ink is dry on the paperwork and in classic middle-child fashion, he’s off doing his own thing. And through it all, The Nightmare never stops haunting Calla: recurring images of her brothers dying that she is powerless to stop.

When Jamie’s actions at a protest spiral out of control, the siblings must go on the run. Taking refuge in a remote cabin that looks like it belongs on a slasher movie poster rather than an AirBNB, the siblings now face a new threat where their lives–and reality–hang in the balance. Their sister always warned them about her nightmares. They really should have listened.]]> 352 Neena Viel 1250906326 Stef 0 to-read 3.26 2025
author: Neena Viel
name: Stef
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 217387838 The latest gripping serial killer thriller from the New York Times bestselling author Alex North.

Dan Garvie’s life has been haunted by the crime he witnessed as a child—narrowly escaping an encounter with a notorious serial killer. He has dedicated his life since to becoming a criminal profiler, eager to seek justice for innocent victims. So when his father passes away under suspicious circumstances, Dan revisits his small island community, determined to uncover the truth about his death. Is it possible that the monster he remembers from his childhood nightmares has returned after all these years?

With his signature shock and suspense, Alex North brings us The Man Made of Smoke. In turn emotional, introspective, and utterly terrifying, this is a story of fathers and sons, shadows and secrets, and the fight we all face to escape the trauma of the past.]]> 320 Alex North 1250757894 Stef 0 to-read 4.25 2025
author: Alex North
name: Stef
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 220161576 In this razor-sharp, diabolical debut thriller, a young woman steps into her deceased twin’s influencer life, only to discover dark secrets hidden behind her social media façade.

Julie Chan has nothing. Her twin sister has everything. Except a pulse.

Julie Chan, a supermarket cashier with nothing to lose, finds herself thrust into the glamorous yet perilous world of her late twin sister, Chloe VanHuusen, a popular influencer. Separated at a young age, the identical twins were polar opposites and rarely spoke, except for one viral video that Chloe initiated (Finding My Long-Lost Twin And Buying Her A House #EMOTIONAL). When Julie discovers Chloe’s lifeless body under mysterious circumstances, she seizes the chance to live the life she’s always envied.

Transforming into Chloe is easier than expected. Julie effortlessly adopts Chloe’s luxurious influencer life, complete with designer clothes, a meticulous skincare routine, and millions of adoring followers. However, Julie soon realizes that Chloe’s seemingly picture-perfect life was anything but.

Haunted by Chloe’s untimely death and struggling to fit into the privileged influencer circle, Julie faces mounting challenges during a weeklong island retreat with Chloe’s exclusive group of influencer friends. As events spiral out of control, Julie uncovers the sinister forces that may have led to her sister’s demise and realizes she might be the next target.]]> 320 Liann Zhang 1668067897 Stef 0 to-read 3.82 2025
author: Liann Zhang
name: Stef
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/31
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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 Stef 0 to-read 3.69 2025
author: Ashley Winstead
name: Stef
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> 217245618
In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora's and her young son's lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family, told through a prism of what-ifs, causing us to consider the "one . . . precious life" we are given. The book’s brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional, gut-wrenching power are certain to make The Names a modern classic.]]> 336 Florence Knapp 0593833902 Stef 0 to-read 4.34 2025
author: Florence Knapp
name: Stef
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 41189557 The “gripping� page-turner� (Time) hitting all the best of summer reading lists, Miracle Creek is perfect for book clubs and fans of Liane Moriarty and Celeste Ng

How far will you go to protect your family? Will you keep their secrets? Ignore their lies?

In a small town in Virginia, a group of people know each other because they’re part of a special treatment center, a hyperbaric chamber that may cure a range of conditions from infertility to autism. But then the chamber explodes, two people die, and it’s clear the explosion wasn’t an accident.

A powerful showdown unfolds as the story moves across characters who are all maybe keeping secrets, hiding betrayals. Chapter by chapter, we shift alliances and gather Was it the careless mother of a patient? Was it the owners, hoping to cash in on a big insurance payment and send their daughter to college? Could it have been a protester, trying to prove the treatment isn’t safe?

“A stunning debut about parents, children and the unwavering hope of a better life, even when all hope seems lost" (Washington Post), Miracle Creek uncovers the worst prejudice and best intentions, tense rivalries and the challenges of parenting a child with special needs. It’s “a quick-paced murder mystery that plumbs the power and perils of community� (O Magazine) as it carefully pieces together the tense atmosphere of a courtroom drama and the complexities of life as an immigrant family. Drawing on the author’s own experiences as a Korean-American, former trial lawyer, and mother of a “miracle submarine� patient, this is a novel steeped in suspense and igniting discussion. Recommended by Erin Morgenstern, Jean Kwok, Jennifer Weiner, Scott Turow, Laura Lippman, and more-- Miracle Creek is a brave, moving debut from an unforgettable new voice.]]> 432 Angie Kim 0374717982 Stef 0 currently-reading 3.88 2019
author: Angie Kim
name: Stef
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> 208932385 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 464 Sally Rooney 0374602646 Stef 0 currently-reading 3.90 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Stef
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> 61387986 The paths of two women on opposite ends of a high-profile sexual abuse scandal set them on a devastating collision course.

On a sultry summer night in Paris, two women meet on line at an ice cream kiosk in the Ile de la Cité. One is tall, fair, striking, with an indeterminate accent. The other, a troubled American TV star, is hiding her beauty and identity under a shapeless sweatshirt, wearing sunglasses even in the darkness. When two leering male tourists hassle the pair, the blonde pulls out a knife and a sisterhood is born. Both women have been victims of male violence, and both are warriors--one trained and calculating, one instinctually ferocious. They each think they know who they are dealing with. But both are very, very wrong.

In a story that unfolds with unexpected humor and the pace of a thriller, acclaimed novelist Helen Schulman lays bare what happens to women--no matter how fortunate they may appear to be on the surface--whose lives have been warped by brutality and misogyny. The issues are universal, but the core of the story is intimate: a passionate exploration of love, betrayal and survival. Lucky Dogs asks and answers a shattering question: How could one woman so utterly betray another?]]> 336 Helen Schulman 059353624X Stef 1 3.16 2023
author: Helen Schulman
name: Stef
average rating: 3.16
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2023/09/06
date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> 216683809
“[An] electrifying…razor-sharp page-turner.� —Carley Fortune, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Every Summer After

Featured in summer reading recommendations by Good Morning America, TIME, ELLE, The Washington Post & more

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Push, a propulsive page-turner about four families whose lives are changed when the unthinkable happens—and what is lost when we give in to our own worst impulses

On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighborhood couples and their children gather for a catered barbecue as the summer winds down; drinks continue late into the night.

Everything is fabulous until the picture-perfect hostess explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack—loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then, his mother can only sit by her son’s hospital bed, where she refuses to speak to anyone, and his life hangs in the balance.

What happens next, over the course of a tense three days, as each of these women grapple with what led to that terrible night?

Exploring envy, women’s friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence, The Whispers is a chilling novel that marks Audrain as a major women's fiction talent.]]> 336 Ashley Audrain 1984881701 Stef 0 currently-reading 3.93 2023
author: Ashley Audrain
name: Stef
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/11
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]]> 99300
Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naĂŻve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women � and how they might be improved.

Collects:
—The Yellow Wallpaper
—Three Thanksgivings
—The Cottagette
—TłÜ°ů˛Ô±đ»ĺ
—Making a Change
—If I Were a Man
—Mr. Peebles' Heart]]> 129 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0486298574 Stef 0 to-read 4.05 1892
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Stef
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
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date added: 2024/09/06
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]]> 343 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.]]> 263 Patrick Süskind Stef 0 to-read 4.05 1985
author: Patrick SĂĽskind
name: Stef
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/29
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]]> 170448 Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned –a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.
When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.]]> 141 George Orwell 0451526341 Stef 0 to-read 4.07 1945
author: George Orwell
name: Stef
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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]]> 195830847
Monk’s haphazard pilgrimage leads him through a city in flux: growing, gentrifying, haunted by its history and its unrealized potential. Everyone he knew from college seems to be doing better than him—and most of them aren’t even doing that well. His run-ins with former classmates, estranged drinking buddies, and prospective lovers challenge his version of events past and present, revealing that recovery is not the happy ending he’d expected, only a fraught next chapter.

Like a sober, millennial Jesus� Son, Michael Deagler’s debut novel is the poignant confession of a recovering addict adrift in the fragmenting landscape of America’s middle class. Shot through with humor, hubris, and hard-earned insight, Early Sobrieties charts the limbos that exist between our better and worst selves, offering a portrait of a stifled generation collectively slouching towards grace.]]> 272 Michael Deagler 1662602243 Stef 0 to-read 3.76
author: Michael Deagler
name: Stef
average rating: 3.76
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]]> 112457526
So writes Sebastian Trapp, reclusive mystery novelist, to his longtime correspondent Nicky Hunter, an expert in detective fiction. With mere months to live, Trapp invites Nicky to his spectacular San Francisco mansion to help draft his life story . . . living alongside his beautiful second wife, Diana; his wayward nephew, Freddy; and his protective daughter, Madeleine. Soon Nicky finds herself caught in an irresistible case of real-life “detective fever.�

“You and I might even solve an old mystery or two.�

Twenty years earlier—on New Year’s Eve 1999—Sebastian’s first wife and teenaged son vanished from different locations, never to be seen again. Did the perfect crime writer commit the perfect crime? And why has he emerged from seclusion, two decades later, to allow a stranger to dig into his past?

“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.�

As Nicky attempts to weave together the strands of Sebastian’s life, she becomes obsessed with discovering the truth . . . while Madeleine begins to question what her beloved father might actually know about that long-ago night. And when a corpse appears in the family’s koi pond, both women are shocked to find that the past isn’t gone—it’s just waiting.]]> 408 A.J. Finn Stef 0 currently-reading 3.52 2024
author: A.J. Finn
name: Stef
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/26
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]]> 2877643 400 Martha Moody 1573221880 Stef 0 to-read 3.21 2001
author: Martha Moody
name: Stef
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/19
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]]> 40258215 The Thinnest Air.

Ignorant of civilization and cautioned against its evils, nineteen-year-old Wren and her two sisters, Sage and Evie, were raised in off-the-grid isolation in a primitive cabin in upstate New York. When the youngest grows gravely ill, their mother leaves with the child to get help from a nearby town. And they never return.

As months pass, hope vanishes. Supplies are low. Livestock are dying. A brutal winter is bearing down. Then comes the stranger. He claims to be looking for the girls� mother, and he’s not leaving without them.

To escape, Wren and her sister must break the rule they’ve grown up with: never go beyond the forest.

Past the thicket of dread, they come upon a house on the other side of the pines. This is where Wren and Sage must confront something more chilling than the unknowable. They’ll discover what’s been hidden from them, what they’re running from, and the secrets that have left them in the dark their entire lives.]]> 273 Minka Kent 1542090105 Stef 0 to-read 4.14 2019
author: Minka Kent
name: Stef
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/16
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]]> 55135628
But what if this wasn't the most traumatic, defining event in her childhood?

Undertaking a radical project, Debora Harding dexterously shifts between the past and present to unravel her story. From the immediate aftermath to the possibility of restorative justice twenty years later, Dancing with the Octopus lays bare the social and political forces that act upon us after the experience of serious crime. A vivid, sly and intimate portrait of one family's disintegration, this is a darkly humorous and ground-breaking narrative of reckoning and recovery.]]> 384 Debora Harding 1782837019 Stef 0 to-read 3.93 2020
author: Debora Harding
name: Stef
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6643156
In Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam's oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own.]]> 263 Stephen Benatar 159017335X Stef 2 3.71 1982
author: Stephen Benatar
name: Stef
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1982
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/15
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]]> 90588424 Ěý
A cop begins seeing huge, blinking eyes where the headlights of cars should be that tell him who to pull over. Two freedom riders take a bus ride that leaves them stranded on a lonely road in Alabama where several unsettling somethings await them. A young girl dives into the depths of the Earth in search of the demon that killed her parents. These are just a few of the worlds of Out There Screaming , Jordan Peele’s anthology of all-new horror stories by Black writers. Featuring an introduction by Peele and an all-star roster of beloved writers and new voices, Out There Screaming is a master class in horror, and—like his spine-chilling films—its stories prey on everything we think we know about our world . . . and redefine what it means to be afraid.
Ěý
Featuring stories Erin E. Adams, Violet Allen, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Maurice Broaddus, Chesya Burke, P. Djèlí Clark, Ezra Claytan Daniels, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Justin C. Key, L. D. Lewis, Nnedi Okorafor, Tochi Onyebuchi, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nicole D. Sconiers, Rion Amilcar Scott, Terence Taylor, and Cadwell Turnbull.]]> 386 Jordan Peele Stef 2 3.89 2023
author: Jordan Peele
name: Stef
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/06/20
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]]> 205435919 NTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER!

From a global star and International Booker Prize finalist, a razor-sharp, unforgettable novel about a maid who’s seen too much and a family at a breaking point

A young girl has died and the family’s maid is being interrogated. She must tell the whole story before arriving at the girl’s death.

Estela came from the countryside, leaving her mother behind, to work for the señor and señora when their only child was born. They wanted a housemaid: “smart appearance, full time,� their ad said. She wanted to make enough money to support her mother and return home. For seven years, Estela cleaned their laundry, wiped their floors, made their meals, kept their secrets, witnessed their fights and frictions, raised their daughter. She heard the rats scrabbling in the ceiling, saw the looks the señor gave the señora; she knew about the poison in the cabinet, the gun, the daughter’s rebellion as she grew up, the mother’s coldness, the father’s distance. She saw it all.

After a series of shocking betrayals and revelations, Estela stops speaking, breaking her silence only now, to tell the story of how it all fell apart. Is this a story of revenge or a confession? Class warfare or a cautionary tale? Building tension with every page, Clean is a gripping, incisive exploration of power, domesticity, and betrayal from an international star at the height of her powers.]]> 272 Alia Trabucco Zerán 0593850513 Stef 0 to-read 3.55 2022
author: Alia Trabucco Zerán
name: Stef
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/20
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]]> 52067244
“Cathy Sweeney’s stories have already attracted a band of fanatical devotees, and this first collection is as marvellous as we could have hoped for. A unique imagination, a brilliant debut.�
—Kevin Barry

“I loved this collection. It vibrates with a glorious strangeness! Magnificently weird, hugely entertaining, deeply profound.�
—Danielle McLaughlin

“In Modern Times, Cathy Sweeney gives us fables of the present that are funny, vertiginous and melancholy.�
—David Hayden]]> 152 Cathy Sweeney 1906539839 Stef 0 to-read 3.23 2020
author: Cathy Sweeney
name: Stef
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/16
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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 Stef 0 to-read 4.33 2023
author: Chloe Michelle Howarth
name: Stef
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/11
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]]> 63237765
She travels first by car and then train to Rosslare, from where she takes a ferry to Fishguard in Wales. Along the way, she finds herself in service stations, shopping centres, train stations, ferry terminals; recalling her youth, earlier fantasies of suicide and reminiscing about those people who have come in and out of her life.

Finally, 48 hours later, alone and isolated in a cottage in Wales, in a strange and eerie landscape, the woman reaches her nadir.

Breakdown is a novel about the rage and reckoning of a middle aged, educated woman who has lived her life in accordance with the expectations of society.]]> 218 Cathy Sweeney 1474618510 Stef 0 to-read 3.68 2023
author: Cathy Sweeney
name: Stef
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62606735
Into this carefully ordered life step Vita and Rollo, a glamorous London couple who move in next door, disarm Sunday with their wit and charm, and proceed to deliciously break just about every rule in her etiquette manual. Soon the two families are in and out of each others houses, and Sunday feels loved and accepted like never before. But beneath Vita and Rollo's charm and wealth there is something else, something darker. And Sunday has something that Vita has always wanted for herself, a beautiful, clever daughter of her own.]]> 297 Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow 1472288009 Stef 0 to-read 3.72 2023
author: Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
name: Stef
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62043762 Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying inability to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that make up a life confined to the home, where both everything and nothing happens.

With shades of Clarice Lispector, Mavis Gallant and Lucy Ellman, this late-period novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist, and film and literary critic Mieko Kanai - whose often dark and cynical work occupies something of a cult place within the Japanese canon - is a disconcerting and astute portrait of life in late-stage capitalist society.]]> 176 Mieko Kanai 1804270385 Stef 0 to-read 3.51 1997
author: Mieko Kanai
name: Stef
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 202065852
It's not long before you discover porn. You don't know what you're watching, but you do know that you shouldn't tell anybody. Later, older, your first kiss is captured on camera and shared with everyone in your year. It feels like betrayal, but soon it feels normal. Part of the incessant cycle of posting, sharing and liking.

Now, you can't remember a time when you didn't feel hollow inside. Now, you know that something has to change.

Chilling, potent and intensely intimate, This is How You Remember It is at once a cautionary tale, a call to arms and a tender love story. It is about a life lived online, and about finding another way, when it's all you've ever known.]]> 289 Catherine Prasifka 1837261466 Stef 0 to-read 4.04
author: Catherine Prasifka
name: Stef
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/07
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]]> 63077595 A twisty thriller from the beloved author of The Familiar Dark, in which a woman returns to the town where her sister was murdered and finds a presumed copycat on the loose

It’s been fourteen years since Greer Dunning’s older sister, Eliza, was murdered, and Greer’s family has never been the same. And now there's been a similar killing in Greer’s small Kansas hometown, Ludlow, after the execution of the convicted killer. A copycat, according to the authorities, but Greer is convinced there is more to the story. That Eliza’s murderer had help all those years ago.

So Greer returns to Ludlow after more than a decade away, desperate to find answers to the questions that have haunted her for years. Her drive to uncover the truth pushes her to form a bond with the unlikeliest of allies.

At once a riveting mystery and a deep exploration of guilt, loss, and the ways in which a violent murder transforms both the family of the victim and the family of the killer, I Did It For You will keep readers captivated through the very last page.]]> 288 Amy Engel 0593187393 Stef 0 to-read 3.49 2023
author: Amy Engel
name: Stef
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 200705467 A luxurious yacht, a gorgeous crew with secrets and rivalries...and murder! I Did Warn Her is a cunning locked room mystery set on a billionaire’s yacht, by the author of last year’s sensation She Started It.

The Ophelia is your typical billionaire yacht: ridiculously luxurious, owned by a ruthless money man, and staffed by a crew whose only job is to indulge the guests� every wish.

Model-gorgeous Sasha is a last-minute hire for a weeklong Atlantic crossing. She joins fellow stewardesses Jade, Imogen, Euphemia, and Lola. The Ophelia’s stewardesses are almost identical—blonde and model-gorgeous—and all were lured to the Ophelia by high wages and a chance to leave their problems behind when they set sail. But despite its sleek opulence, the Ophelia isn’t as heavenly as it seems. A stewardess on the previous charter died under mysterious circumstances, the guests� expensive jewelry keeps disappearing, and the crew grows steadily more and more suspicious of one another.

Then the yacht’s owner brings aboard his best friend and two more women, also beautiful. Also hiding something.

When a crew member turns up dead after a night of partying, everyone on the yacht is a suspect. Who is the jewel thief? Who is the murderer? What will happen when the lights go out, and the crew and the guests are finally on equal footing?

Endlessly twisty and delightfully voyeuristic, I Did Warn Her is a whodunnit on the high seas, where the dark secrets of the ultra-wealthy have nowhere to hide.]]> Sian Gilbert Stef 0 to-read 3.84
author: Sian Gilbert
name: Stef
average rating: 3.84
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/22
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]]> 19199461 158 Agatha Christie 162793037X Stef 4 4.01 1920
author: Agatha Christie
name: Stef
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1920
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/05
date added: 2024/04/05
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]]> 60731959 For fans of Lucy Foley and Liane Moriarty, She Started It is a hot, twisty summer debut thriller about a group of young women whose Caribbean bachelorette party takes a sinister turn. It’s Lord of the Flies meets And Then There Were None...but with Instagram and too much prosecco.

The party of a lifetime is nothing like what they expected...

Annabel, Esther, Tanya, and Chloe are best friends—or were, as children. Despite drifting apart in adulthood, shared secrets have kept them bonded for better or worse, even as their childhood dreams haven’t quite turned out as they’d hoped. Then one day they receive a wholly unexpected—but not entirely unwelcome—invitation from another old friend. Poppy Greer has invited them all to her extravagant bachelorette party: a first-class plane ticket to three days of white sand, cocktails, and relaxation on a luxe private island in the Bahamas.

None of them has spoken to Poppy in years. But Poppy’s Instagram pics shows that the girl they used to consider the weakest link in their group has definitely made good—and made money. Curiosity gets the better of them. Besides, who can turn down a posh all-expenses-paid vacation on a Caribbean island?

The first-class flight and the island’s accommodations are just as opulent as expected...even if the scenic island proves more remote than they’d anticipated. Quite remote, in fact, with no cell service, and no other guests. The women quickly discover they’ve underestimated Poppy, and each other. As their darkest secrets are revealed, the tropical adventure morphs into a terrifying nightmare.

Endlessly twisty, sharply observant, and deliciously catty, She Started It is sure to shock readers until the very end.]]> 352 Sian Gilbert 0063286327 Stef 4 3.64 2023
author: Sian Gilbert
name: Stef
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/26
date added: 2024/03/26
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]]> 60381397
Winner of the HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis]]> 160 Ivana Sajko 3863913302 Stef 3 3.54 2015
author: Ivana Sajko
name: Stef
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/16
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]]> 58142553 272 Johanna Kaplan 0063061635 Stef 1 3.24
author: Johanna Kaplan
name: Stef
average rating: 3.24
book published:
rating: 1
read at: 2024/02/27
date added: 2024/02/27
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]]> 127282631 Following the death of her closest friend, Sloane Crosley explores multiple kinds of loss in this disarmingly witty and poignant memoir.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.]]> 208 Sloane Crosley 0374609845 Stef 0 to-read 3.84 2024
author: Sloane Crosley
name: Stef
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 185767233 Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise meets Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in a Black woman’s coming-of-age story, chronicling a life-changing friendship, the interplay between music fandom and identity, and the slipperiness of sanity

Set in the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is an immersive journey into the life and mind of Khaki Oliver, who’s perennially trying to disappear into something: a codependent friendship, an ill-advised boyfriend, the punk scene, or simply, the ether. These days it’s a meaningless job and a comfortingly empty apartment. Then, after a decade of estrangement, she receives a letter from her former best friend. Fiona’s throwing a party for her newly adopted daughter and wants Khaki to join the celebration.

Khaki is equal parts terrified and tempted to reconnect. Their platonic love was confusing, all-consuming, and encouraged their worst impulses. While stalling her RSVP, Khaki starts crafting the perfect mixtape—revisiting memories of formative shows, failed romances, and the ups and downs of desire and denial—while weighing the risks and rewards of saying yes to Fiona again.

One song at a time, from 1980s hardcore to 2010s emo, the shared and separate contours of each woman’s mind come into focus. Will listening to the same old songs on repeat doom Khaki to a lonely life of arrested development? Or will hindsight help her regain her sense of self and pave a healthy path for the future, with or without Fiona?]]> 336 Mariah Stovall 1593767609 Stef 0 to-read 3.17 2024
author: Mariah Stovall
name: Stef
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59464153 156 Corinne Hoex 1628973684 Stef 1 3.55 2022
author: Corinne Hoex
name: Stef
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2024/01/27
date added: 2024/01/27
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]]> 61053833
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.]]> 448 Rebecca Makkai 0593490150 Stef 3 3.72 2023
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Stef
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/21
date added: 2024/01/21
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]]> 63222117 Staying with a friend and her husband is sexier—and deadlier—than anyone could have imagined, in this provocative domestic suspense novel

Kelly’s new life in Philadelphia has turned into a nightmare: She’s friendless and jobless, and the lockdown has her trapped in a tiny apartment with the man she gave up everything for, who’s just called off their wedding. The only bright spot is her newly rekindled friendship with her childhood friend Sabrina—now a glamorous bestselling author with a handsome, high-powered husband.

When Sabrina and Nathan offer Kelly an escape hatch, volunteering the spare room of their remote Virginia mansion, she jumps at the chance to run away from her old life. There, Kelly secretly finds herself falling for both her enchanting hosts—until one night, a wild and unexpected threesome leads the couple to open their marriage for her.

At first, Kelly loves being part of this risqué new world. But when she discovers that the last woman they invited into their marriage is missing, she starts to wonder if they could be dangerous . . . and if she might be next.]]> 336 Andrea Bartz 1984820508 Stef 1 3.23 2023
author: Andrea Bartz
name: Stef
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/01/14
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]]> 41880044
When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that's to come. By 2016, their four radically different daughters are each in a state of unrest: Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator-turned-stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt when the darkest part of her past resurfaces; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. Above it all, the daughters share the lingering fear that they will never find a love quite like their parents'.

As the novel moves through the tumultuous year following the arrival of Jonah Bendt--given up by one of the daughters in a closed adoption fifteen years before--we are shown the rich and varied tapestry of the Sorensons' past: years marred by adolescence, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.]]> 532 Claire Lombardo 0385544251 Stef 0 not-sure-i-want-to-continue 3.88 2019
author: Claire Lombardo
name: Stef
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/06
shelves: not-sure-i-want-to-continue
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]]> 63930798 Lorrie Moore's first novel since A Gate at the Stairs--a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart

From "one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation" (Caryn James; The New York Times)--a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things--seen and unseen.

A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all . . .

With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.]]> 210 Lorrie Moore Stef 3 3.52 2023
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Stef
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
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]]> 179844473 When I’ve been overtaken, I have stood and watched the water in my porridge simmer away into the air, and then the oats turn black and crackle with dryness, and my ears fill with the smoke alarm’s shriek.
When Adele Dumont is diagnosed with trichotillomania � compulsive hair-pulling � it makes sense of much of her life to date. The seemingly harmless quirk of her late teens, which rapidly developed into almost uncontrollable urges and then into trance-like episodes, is a hallmark of the disease, as is the secrecy with which she guarded her condition from her family, friends, and the world at large.
The diagnosis also opens up a rich line of inquiry. Where might the origins of this condition be found? How can we distinguish between a nervous habit and a compulsion? And how do we balance the relief of being �seen� by others with our experience of shame?
Reminiscent of the writing of Leslie Jamison and Fiona Wright, The Pulling is a fascinating exploration of the inner workings of a mind. In perfectly judged prose, both probing and affecting, Dumont illuminates how easily ritual can slide into obsession, and how close beneath the surface horror and darkness can lie.]]> 288 Adele Dumont 1922585912 Stef 0 to-read 4.30 2024
author: Adele Dumont
name: Stef
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 126262032 Librarian's Note: This is the entry for the short story collection. Please don't combine it with the short story of the same name.


A triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, misogyny, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men. Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.

In “So Late in the Day,� Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently.

In “The Long and Painful Death,� a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions.

And in “Antarctica,â€� a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.Ěý

Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802160859 Stef 0 to-read 3.98 2022
author: Claire Keegan
name: Stef
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/01
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]]> 60033850
When Del returns to her hometown for the funeral, she discovers the now mega-church—and the insidious, patriarchal teachings of Pastor Rick Franklin—has grown not only in size but in influence. Eve was clearly discontent in her marriage, despite the carefully constructed “Noble Wife� positivity of her blog posts, and Del knows better than anyone just how far she will go to get what she wants. Del is determined to cut through the church’s lies and corruption to find out who killed Lars—even if it means confronting the religious trauma she’s spent years trying to bury.]]> 272 Amy Suiter Clarke 0358419468 Stef 1 3.77 2023
author: Amy Suiter Clarke
name: Stef
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
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]]> 60466391 What if the murder you had to solve was your own?

Lou is a happily married mother of an adorable toddler. She's also the victim of a local serial killer. Recently brought back to life and returned to her grieving family by a government project, she is grateful for this second chance. But as the new Lou re-adapts to her old routines, and as she bonds with other female victims, she realizes that disturbing questions remain about what exactly preceded her death and how much she can really trust those around her.

Now it's not enough to care for her child, love her husband, and work the job she's always enjoyed--she must also figure out the circumstances of her death. Darkly comic, tautly paced, and full of surprises, My Murder is a devour-in-one-sitting, clever twist on the classic thriller.]]> 304 Katie Williams 0593543785 Stef 0 3.83 2023
author: Katie Williams
name: Stef
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/13
date added: 2023/12/13
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]]> 51845368 Instant New York Times Bestseller

From the internationally bestselling author of What She Left Behind comes a gripping and powerful tale of upheaval—a heartbreaking saga of resilience and hope perfect for fans of Beatriz Williams and Kristin Hannah—set in Philadelphia during the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak—the deadly pandemic that went on to infect one-third of the world’s population�

“Readers will not be able to help making comparisons to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how little has changed since 1918. Wiseman has written a touching tale of loss, survival, and perseverance with some light fantastical elements. Highly recommended.�
�Booklist

“An immersive historical tale with chilling twists and turns. Beautifully told and richly imagined.�
—Stephanie Dray, New York Times bestselling author of America’s First Daughter

In the fall of 1918, thirteen-year-old German immigrant Pia Lange longs to be far from Philadelphia’s overcrowded slums and the anti-immigrant sentiment that compelled her father to enlist in the U.S. Army. But as her city celebrates the end of war, an even more urgent threat arrives: the Spanish flu. Funeral crepe and quarantine signs appear on doors as victims drop dead in the streets and desperate survivors wear white masks to ward off illness. When food runs out in the cramped tenement she calls home, Pia must venture alone into the quarantined city in search of supplies, leaving her baby brothers behind.

Bernice Groves has become lost in grief and bitterness since her baby died from the Spanish flu. Watching Pia leave her brothers alone, Bernice makes a shocking, life-altering decision. It becomes her sinister mission to tear families apart when they’re at their most vulnerable, planning to transform the city’s orphans and immigrant children into what she feels are “true Americans.�

Waking in a makeshift hospital days after collapsing in the street, Pia is frantic to return home. Instead, she is taken to St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum � the first step in a long and arduous journey. As Bernice plots to keep the truth hidden at any cost in the months and years that follow, Pia must confront her own shame and fear, risking everything to see justice � and love � triumph at last. Powerful, harrowing, and ultimately exultant, The Orphan Collector is a story of love, resilience, and the lengths we will go to protect those who need us most.

“Wiseman’s writing is superb, and her descriptions of life during the Spanish Flu epidemic are chilling. Well-researched and impossible to put down, this is an emotional tug-of-war played out brilliantly on the pages and in readers� hearts.�
�The Historical Novels Review, EDITOR’S CHOICE

“Wiseman’s depiction of the horrifying spread of the Spanish flu is eerily reminiscent of the present day and resonates with realistic depictions of suffering, particularly among the poorer immigrant population.�
�Publishers Weekly (Boxed Review)

“Reading the novel in the time of COVID-19 adds an even greater resonance, and horror, to the description of the fatal spread of that 1918 flu.�
�Kirkus Review

“An emotional roller coaster…I felt Pia’s strength, courage, guilt, and grief come through the pages clear as day.�
—The Seattle Book Review]]> 399 Ellen Marie Wiseman Stef 0 to-read 4.18 2020
author: Ellen Marie Wiseman
name: Stef
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 4965
Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition.

As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. ]]> 304 Geraldine Brooks 0142001430 Stef 0 to-read 4.00 2001
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Stef
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57312241
Full of powerful, physical imagery, this prize-winning debut novel by acclaimed Catalan poet Eva Baltasar was a word-of-mouth hit in its own language. It is a breathtakingly forthright call for women’s freedom to embrace both pleasure and solitude, and speaks of the body, of sex, and of the self.]]> 144 Eva Baltasar 1911508741 Stef 2 3.92 2018
author: Eva Baltasar
name: Stef
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2023/11/06
date added: 2023/11/06
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]]> 53540403
These people did not even realize that movie star Meredith White was living on their street. Now, they are sharing her mansion, as well as their most closely kept secrets. Without the walls and privacy of their own homes, one by one, new relationships are forged. For every neighbor there is a story, from the doctor whose wife and children fear him, to the beautiful young woman dating a dishonorable man, to the aspiring writer caring for a famous blind musician.

In the heart of the crisis, Meredith finds herself venturing back into the world. And thanks to the suspicions and the dogged detective work of a disaster relief volunteer, a former military officer named Charles, a shocking truth about her own world is exposed. Suddenly Meredith sees her isolation, her estranged family, and even her acting career in a whole new light.

Filled with powerful human dramas, Neighbors is a penetrating look at how our world can be upended in a moment. In a novel of unforgettable characters and stunning twists, acts of love and courage become the most powerful forces of all.]]> 270 Danielle Steel 1984821385 Stef 2 4.10 2021
author: Danielle Steel
name: Stef
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2021/06/16
date added: 2023/10/31
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]]> 60784806
Years later, still unable to live down the guilt surrounding what happened to her brother, Chris, and now with a child of her own to protect, Katie struggles to separate the real threats from the imagined. Then she gets the phone call: Chris has gone missing and needs his big sister once more.

Meanwhile, Detective Laurence Page is facing a particularly gruesome crime. A distinguished professor of fate and free will has been brutally murdered just hours after firing his staff. All the leads point back to two old cases: the gruesome attack on teenager Christopher Shaw, and the despicable crimes of a notorious serial killer who, legend had it, could see the future.

A dark, suspenseful new thriller about the mysteries of fate, the unbreakable bond of siblings, and a notorious serial killer who was said to know the future.]]> 336 Alex North 125075786X Stef 0 to-read 3.39 2023
author: Alex North
name: Stef
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 51031906
Sayaka Murata brilliantly captures the atmosphere of the familiar convenience store that is so much part of life in Japan. With some laugh-out-loud moments prompted by the disconnect between Keiko’s thoughts and those of the people around her, she provides a sharp look at Japanese society and the pressure to conform, as well as penetrating insights into the female mind. Convenience Store Woman is a fresh, charming portrait of an unforgettable heroine that recalls Banana Yoshimoto, Han Kang, and ´ˇłľĂ©±ôľ±±đ.]]> 176 Sayaka Murata Stef 2 3.74 2016
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Stef
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2023/09/23
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves:
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every time that man spoke, i zoned out.
]]> 157119995 342 Jane Jesmond 0857308505 Stef 0 to-read 3.65
author: Jane Jesmond
name: Stef
average rating: 3.65
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 169335533 SIX CLASSMATES. ONE TERRIFYING NIGHT. A MURDER TWENTY YEARS IN THE MAKING�

There’s something sinister under the surface of the idyllic, suburban town of Wesley Falls, and it’s not just the abandoned coal mine that lies beneath it. The summer of 1995 kicks off with a party in the mine where six high school students witness a horrifying crime that changes the course of their lives.

The six couldn’t be more different.

� Maddy, a devout member of the local megachurch
� Kelly, the bookworm next door
� James, a cynical burnout
� Casey, a loveable football player
� Padma, the shy straight-A student
� Jia, who’s starting to see visions she can’t explain

When they realize that they can’t trust anyone but each other, they begin to investigate what happened on their own. As tensions escalate in town to a breaking point, the six make a vow of silence, bury all their evidence, and promise to never contact each other again. Their plan works � almost.

Twenty years later, Jia calls them all back to Wesley Falls—Maddy has been murdered, and they are the only ones who can uncover why. But to end things, they have to return to the mine one last time.]]> 440 Vera Kurian 0778310760 Stef 0 to-read 3.52 2024
author: Vera Kurian
name: Stef
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61948931 The Favor, The New Mother is both relatable and nerve-wracking, sympathetic and bone-chilling—a fresh new twist on motherhood and murder in suburbia.

Isolated. Lonely. Tired. It's hard being The New Mother. Sometimes it's murder.

Nothing is simple about being a new mom alone in a new house, especially when your baby is collicky. Natalie Fanning loves her son unconditionally, but being a mother was not all she wanted to be.

Enter Paul, the neighbor.

Paul provides the lifeline she needs in what feels like the most desperate of times. When Paul is helping with Oliver, calmed by his reassuring, steady presence, Nat feels like she can finally rest.

But Paul wants something in return. It’s no coincidence that he has befriended Nat—she is the perfect pawn for his own plan. Will Nat wake up in time to see it?]]> 304 Nora Murphy 1250822459 Stef 1 3.74 2023
author: Nora Murphy
name: Stef
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2023/09/19
date added: 2023/09/19
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]]> 104625853
A middle-aged Black woman exacts revenge on the aggressively average men she meets on dating sites. A girl buries pieces of herself in a hole beneath an apple tree, hoping to escape her mother’s life of struggle and servitude. A group of teenage girls compete for the title of "Worst Girl in America.� A young woman in Taiwan becomes infatuated with a female scam caller, a fleeting ghost of a love that blossoms from strangeness. And a wealthy woman goes to unconventional, and perhaps not entirely ethical, lengths to find her dream man.

In these sixteen stories, we see women at their most monstrous—as con artists and murderers, cutthroats and scalpers, ruled by ambition and grief and spite. Characters for those tired of being told to play nice. Dressed to the nines in morally gray, the stories in this anthology comprise an envelope full of teeth: each one distinct, unsettling, and sharp enough to rip out a throat.]]> 256 Molly Llewellyn 1950539873 Stef 0 to-read 3.57 2023
author: Molly Llewellyn
name: Stef
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/27
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]]> 61813105 An exquisite new collection from a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of the short story, the culmination of a five-decade career: work that takes us beneath the placid surface of suburban life into the elusive strangeness of the everyday

Here are eighteen stories of astonishing range and precision. A housewife drinks alone in her Connecticut living room. A guillotine glimmers above a sleepy town green. A pre-recorded customer service message sends a caller into a reverie of unspeakable yearning. With the deft touch and funhouse-mirror perspectives for which he has won countless admirers, Steven Millhauser gives us the towns, marriages, and families of a quintessential American lifestyle that is at once instantly recognizable and profoundly unsettling. Disruptions is a collection of provocative, bracingly original new work from a writer at the peak of his form.]]> 288 Steven Millhauser 0593535413 Stef 0 to-read 3.72 2023
author: Steven Millhauser
name: Stef
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 1540810 Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journey that stretches the boundaries of the ordinary world.]]> 244 Steven Millhauser 0307267563 Stef 0 to-read 3.81 2008
author: Steven Millhauser
name: Stef
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/27
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]]> 18373 Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.
Ěý
Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence � a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?]]> 311 Daniel Keyes 015603008X Stef 5 favorites-would-recommend 4.19 1966
author: Daniel Keyes
name: Stef
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1966
rating: 5
read at: 2019/01/12
date added: 2023/08/24
shelves: favorites-would-recommend
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]]> 61434940 208 Szilvia Molnar 0593316851 Stef 5 3.77 2023
author: Szilvia Molnar
name: Stef
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/22
date added: 2023/08/22
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]]> 57486690 An editor at This American Life reveals the searing story of the secret binge-eating that dominated her adolescence and shapes her still.

"Her tale of compulsion and healing is candid and powerful."--People

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE

For almost thirty years, Susan Burton hid her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret.

When Burton was thirteen, her stable life in suburban Michigan was turned upside down by her parents' abrupt divorce, and she moved to Colorado with her mother and sister. She seized on this move west as an adventure and an opportunity to reinvent herself from middle-school nerd to popular teenage girl. But in the fallout from her parents' breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from "peculiarity to pathology."

Susan entered into a painful cycle of anorexia and binge eating that formed a subterranean layer to her sunny life. She went from success to success--she went to Yale, scored a dream job at a magazine right out of college, and married her college boyfriend. But in college the compulsive eating got worse--she'd binge, swear it would be the last time, and then, hours later, do it again--and after she graduated she descended into anorexia, her attempt to "quit food."

Binge eating is more prevalent than anorexia or bulimia, but there is less research and little storytelling to help us understand it. In tart, soulful prose Susan Burton strikes a blow for the importance of this kind of narrative and tells an exhilarating story of longing, compulsion and hard-earned self-revelation.]]> 320 Susan Burton 081298272X Stef 0 to-read 3.83 2020
author: Susan Burton
name: Stef
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57695472
After years of severed communication, Justin appears on his sister’s doorstep needing a place to stay. The home he's made for himself has collapsed, as has everything else in his life. When they were children, Willa played the role of her brother’s protector, but now, afraid of the chaos he might bring, she’s reluctant to let him in.

Willa lives a carefully ordered life working as a nurse and making ornate dioramas in her spare time. As Justin tries to connect with the people she’s closest to—her landlord, her boyfriend, their mother—she begins to feel exposed. Willa and Justin’s relationship has always been strained yet loving, frustrating and close. But it hits a new breaking point when Justin spirals out of control, unable to manage his sobriety and the sustained effects of a brain injury.

Years earlier, in high school, desperate to escape his home life and his disapproving, troubled mother, Justin falls into the hands of his first lover, a slightly older boy living on his own who offers Justin some semblance of intimacy and refuge. When Justin’s boyfriend commits a terrifying act of violence, the two flee on a doomed road trip, a journey that will damage Justin and change his and his family’s lives forever.

Weaving together these two timelines, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest unravels the thread of a young man’s trauma and the love waiting for him on the other side.]]> 288 Richard Mirabella 1646221184 Stef 4 3.76 2023
author: Richard Mirabella
name: Stef
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/19
date added: 2023/08/20
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This book dives into how different growing up in the same household does not equal the same experience or memory. Justin and Willa have seen their household go from having both parents to dealing with a loss of their father and the unbalance of a mother trying to grapple with not being able to control all aspects of her children’s lives. Justin and Willa struggle with this in different ways, Justin rebels and Willa obeys. Justin is also struggling with being seen as gay and the struggle dynamic in his first relationship with a man who oozes masculinity while forcing him into uncomfortable and painful situations. This leads to the biggest turning point in his life when an assault goes too far. Justin has had to live with the consequences and continues to fail to see how it has affected his sister and mom. He tries to cope with his grief, anger, sadness, and fears by distancing himself from those who try to get close to him or his need to be cared for by others, as being too close to someone is what broke him. Willa does the same except with her mother and her brother, Justin. Yet the dysfunctional bond brings them together when it’s needed most. This is a story of things left unsaid and silent suffering. It is a truly sad story from beginning to end.
]]> 62039324 A novel about guilt, rage, imagination, and boyhood, about being lost in the dark and learning you’re not alone


This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.

You mustn’t do that to yourself Shy. You mustn’t hurt yourself like that.

He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him.

Got your special meds, nutcase?

He is escaping Last Chance, a home for “very disturbed young men,� and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past, and the heavy question of his future.

The night is huge and it hurts.

In Shy, Max Porter extends the excavation of boyhood that began with Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and continued with Lanny. But here he asks: How does mischievous wonder and anarchic energy curdle into something more disturbing and violent? Shy is a bravura, lyric, music-besotted performance by one of the great writers of his generation.]]> 136 Max Porter 1644452294 Stef 0 to-read 3.62 2023
author: Max Porter
name: Stef
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/19
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]]> 61822625 All talk, no action: The Mezzanine meets Ducks, Newburyport in this meandering and captivating debut




It's a hot summer night, and Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of a day and night in an uncannily depopulated public park, he will sift through the pieces and traverse the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the pathos of Gene Hackman, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riel's letter to an Irish newspaper, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, the CIA, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing. The result is a strange, meandering sojourn, as if the history-haunted landscapes of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn were shrunk down to a mere 85 acres.



These digressions are anchored by remarks from the letters of Keats, by snatches of lyrics from Irish rebel songs and Scottish folk ballads, and, above all else, by the world-shattering call of the red-winged blackbird.




"From the first page to the last I felt wholly captivated by Falling Hour and Hugh's sensitive and far-ranging digressions. Morrison has captured the magic of Sebald and made it entirely his own, a curiously anti-capitalist exploration of what it means to live in a "fake" country. " - Andr� Babyn, author of Evie of the Deepthorn

"Falling Hour is a profound incantatory exhalation - a quiet triumph; to read it is to engage in a smart, humane and at times very funny conversation that you will never want to end." - Simon Okotie, author of After Absalon

"A stellar debut novel by a stellar new talent. Falling Hour is written in a prose style that enlivens every page." - Mauro Javier C�rdenas, author of Aphasia: A Novel
]]> 224 Geoffrey D. Morrison 1770567291 Stef 0 to-read 3.98
author: Geoffrey D. Morrison
name: Stef
average rating: 3.98
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/19
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]]> 50729298 A beautifully written atmospheric story of trauma, grief and redemption, Still Water is a debut from a bright new voice in literary fiction.

When Jane Douglas returns to the Shetland Islands, she thinks she has escaped the dark shadows of her childhood. She carves out a simple life on the bleak, windswept island, working at the salmon fishery and spending quiet evenings at home. And for the first time in her life, she’s happy.

Then the body of Jane’s long-missing mother is found in a flooded quarry. Her mother disappeared when Jane was a teenager, following the death of Jane’s baby brother. Jane has spent her life running from her past, living in fear that she has inherited her mother’s demons. Now, Jane must face what actually happened on that fateful, tragic day twenty years ago…]]> 400 Rebecca Pert Stef 0 to-read 4.11 2021
author: Rebecca Pert
name: Stef
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/19
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]]> 62039294
But when Sean returns home from university, he finds much of the same-the same friends doing the same gear in the same clubs; the same lost broth­ers and mad fathers; the same closed doors; the same silences. There are no jobs, Sean's degree isn't worth the paper it's written on, and no one will give him the time of day. One night, he assaults a stranger at a party, and everything begins to come undone.

Close to Home begins with this sudden act of violence and expands into a startling portrait of working-class Ireland under the long shadow of the Troubles. It's a first novel drawn from life, written with the immediacy of thought. It's about what happens when men get desperate, about the cycles of loss and trauma and secrecy that keep them trapped, and about the struggle to get free.]]> 288 Michael Magee 0374608326 Stef 0 to-read 4.06 2023
author: Michael Magee
name: Stef
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/19
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]]> 61157636 Cold Nights of Childhood grows up in a rapidly changing Turkey, where the atmosphere is nationalist, patriarchal, technocratic. As a misfit in search of freedom, love and happiness, she escapes to Berlin, is overcome by depression on her return, and trapped in a psychiatry clinic for five years. After electroshock therapy and inhumane treatment, she is released into the care of friends and family, making tentative steps in a halting journey towards recovery.

In her unique, unstructured style, Tezer Ă–zlĂĽ explores the extremity of her inner life and the painful pleasures of memory. Translated into English for the first time by Maureen Freely, this novel is a classic akin to The Bell Jar and Good Morning, Midnight.]]> 96 Tezer Ozlu 1788168712 Stef 0 to-read 3.70 1980
author: Tezer Ozlu
name: Stef
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/19
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]]> 61407616 A summer in Greece for three best friends ends in the unthinkable when only two return home in this new novel from Ella Berman. . . .

Ten years ago, after a sun-soaked summer spent in Greece, best friends Bess and Joni were cleared of having any involvement in their friend Evangeline’s death. But that didn’t stop the media from ripping apart their teenage lives like vultures.

While the girls were never convicted, Joni, ever the opportunist, capitalized on her newfound infamy to become a motivational speaker. Bess, on the other hand, resolved to make her life as small and controlled as possible so she wouldn’t risk losing everything all over again. And it almost worked. . . .

Except now Joni is tangled up in a crime eerily similar to that one fateful night in Greece. And when she asks Bess to come back to LA to support her, Bess has a decision to make.

Is it finally time to face up to what happened that night, exposing herself as the young woman she once was and maybe still is? And what happens if she doesn’t like what she finds?]]> 384 Ella Berman 0593099540 Stef 0 to-read 3.36 2023
author: Ella Berman
name: Stef
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/19
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]]> 58349243
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction
Finalist for the California Book Awards
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Novel

Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in this fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace.

On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions—nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears.

Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator’s spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics.

With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past.]]> 304 Ruth Madievsky Stef 0 to-read 3.48 2023
author: Ruth Madievsky
name: Stef
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/19
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]]> 58885840
Leaving her fiancé in the dark, Ginny flees to Germany to research a novel about the maverick sea captain Count von Luckner, who was lauded for his courage. �What was courage anyway?� she wonders. �Did it rise up out of some kind of counter-pressure?� Navigating transient, hedonistic Berlin on her own, she absorbs the city’s tangle of stories as she tries to gather the strength to face her future.

Set in 2019 as it turns into 2020, I Laugh Me Broken is a novel about an inescapable past and the complex play between genetic inheritance and the choices that are ours to make. It is, finally, a hard-won love story.

Praise for In the Neighbourhood of Fame (2015)

'packed full of astute observation, spinning towards a crisis which doesn’t have a predictable outcome.' —Linda Herrick, NZ Herald

�'finely tuned observations of relationships and identity, and how easily they can be the making or undoing of each other.' —Sam Finnemore, NZ Listener

'an adult, thought-provoking and gripping story on a real social issue.' —Steve Walker, Sunday Star-Times

Bridget van der Zijpp is the author of two previous novels: Misconduct (shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers� Best First Book Prize, South East Asia and the Pacific region, and the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards Best First Book of Fiction) and In the Neighbourhood of Fame. She returned to Auckland in March 2020 after living in Berlin for three years.

Cover: Gabriel von Max (1840�1915), Tannhäuser, c.1878.]]> 272 Bridget van der Zijpp 1776564294 Stef 0 to-read 3.39 2021
author: Bridget van der Zijpp
name: Stef
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 75495002 When a father goes missing, his family's desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another--both a riveting page-turner and a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

"We didn't call the police right away." Those are the first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean-American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.

Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything--which is why she isn't initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don't return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia's brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, race, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. With all the powerful storytelling she brought to her award-winning debut Miracle Creek, Angie Kim turns the missing person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another.]]> 387 Angie Kim 0593448200 Stef 0 to-read 3.72 2023
author: Angie Kim
name: Stef
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61273768
Ranita Atwater is “getting short.�

She is almost done with her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center. With three years of sobriety, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children.

My name is Ranita, and I’m an addict, she has said again and again at recovery meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become? As she claims the story housed within her pomegranate-like heart, she is determined to confront the weight of the past and discover what might lie beyond mere survival.

Ranita is regaining her freedom, but she’s leaving behind her lover Maxine, who has inspired her to imagine herself and the world differently. Now she must steer clear of the temptations that have pulled her down, while atoning for her missteps and facing old wounds. With a fierce, smart, and sometimes funny voice, Ranita reveals how rocky and winding the path to wellness is for a Black woman, even as she draws on family, memory, faith, and love in order to choose life.

Perfect or fans of Jesmyn Ward and Yaa Gyasi, Pomegranate is a complex portrayal of queer Black womanhood and marginalization in America: a story of loss, healing, redemption, and strength. In lyrical and precise prose, Helen Elaine Lee paints a humane and unflinching portrait of the devastating effects of incarceration and addiction, and of one woman’s determination to tell her story.]]> 352 Helen Elaine Lee 1982171898 Stef 2 3.96 2023
author: Helen Elaine Lee
name: Stef
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/07/30
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]]> 54310999
But when Ava’s new boss—the young and magnetic Mat Putnam—offers Ava a ride home one afternoon, an unlikely relationship blossoms. Ava remembers how rewarding it can be to open up—and, despite her instincts, she becomes enamored. But Mat isn’t who he claims to be, and the romance takes a sharp turn.

The Very Nice Box is a wryly funny, suspenseful debut—with a shocking twist. It’s at once a send-up of male entitlement and a big-hearted account of grief, friendship, and trust.]]> 320 Laura Blackett Stef 0 to-read 3.76 2021
author: Laura Blackett
name: Stef
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 123856309 FINALIST FOR THE 2023 PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN AWARD FOR FICTION

Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Sean Michaels' luminous new novel takes readers on a lyrical joy ride—seven, epic days in Silicon Valley with a tall, formidable poet (inspired by the real-life Marianne Moore) and her unusual new collaborator, a digital mind just one month old. It's both a love letter to and an aching examination of art-making, family, identity and belonging.

Dear Marian, the letter from the Company begins. You are one of the great writers of this century.

At 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem.

Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them.

Over the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know ("Do you remember being born?" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves—and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set—she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.]]> 335 Sean Michaels 1039006752 Stef 0 to-read 3.77 2023
author: Sean Michaels
name: Stef
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61653491 Winding seamlessly between the psychological and the mythological, the spellbinding story of a young woman's dangerous passion as it plays out over the course of an eerie summer

In their remote Viking settlement, Folkvi and her brother, Aslakr, have always been close--unnaturally close. They've grown more intimate still as Folkvi learns her shaman mother's craft, as men regard her with newly devouring eyes. Then illness carries off their parents, and the nest of home is shattered. �slakr sets off on his first expedition, abandoning Folkvi to the dark of an endless winter. When he returns, he's done the unthinkable: He's found someone else to love.

Sick with grief, Folkvi rages to the gods where they sit at the foot of an ancient tree, contemplating the twisted passions of humans that play out in the face of an ever-approaching end of days. Will none of them save her now? Very well, Folkvi will save herself. The wedding date is set. But first comes a fateful summer. . .

Deeply unsettling and brilliantly imagined, First Comes Summer captures the terror of losing the world you've always known--and the uncanny extremes to which you might go to hold on to it.]]> 224 Maria Hesselager Stef 1 3.19 2021
author: Maria Hesselager
name: Stef
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2023/07/17
date added: 2023/07/17
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]]> 61300994
Sam is seven years old and living in Beverly, Massachusetts. She adores her father, though he isn’t around much. Her mother struggles to make ends meet, and never fails to remind Sam that if she studies hard and acts responsibly, adulthood will be easier—more secure and comfortable. But comfort and security are of little interest to Sam. She doesn’t fit in at school, where the other girls have the right shade of blue jeans and don’t question the rules. She doesn’t care about jeans or rules. All she wants to climb. Hanging from the highest limbs of the tallest trees, scaling the side of a building, Sam feels free.

As a teenager, Sam begins to doubt herself. She yearns to be noticed, even as she wants to disappear. When her climbing coach takes an interest in her, his attention is more complicated than she anticipated. She resents her father’s erratic behavior, but she grieves after he’s gone. And she resists her mother’s attempts to plan for her future, even as that future draws closer.

The simplicity of this tender, emotionally honest novel is what makes it so powerful. Sam by Allegra Goodman will break your heart, but will also leave you full of hope.]]> 310 Allegra Goodman 0593447824 Stef 2 4.02 2023
author: Allegra Goodman
name: Stef
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/07/15
date added: 2023/07/15
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]]> 60392079 A razor-sharp suspense about two local librarians whose lives become dangerously intertwined.

No one knows Margo’s real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality, and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges.

That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo’s subtly sinister edge, and watches her carefully. When a patron’s death in the library bathroom gives her a hint of Margo’s mysterious past, Patricia can’t resist digging deeper—even as this new fixation becomes all-consuming.

Taut and compelling, How Can I Help You explores the dark side of human nature and the dangerous pull of artistic obsession.]]> 256 Laura Sims 059354370X Stef 3 3.40 2023
author: Laura Sims
name: Stef
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/17
date added: 2023/06/17
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]]> 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 Stef 0 to-read 4.06 2023
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Stef
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 63366030
Malcolm MacarthurĚýwas a well-known Dublin socialite and heir.ĚýSuave and urbane, he passed his days mingling with artists and aristocrats, reading philosophy, living a life of the mind. But by 1982, his inheritance had dwindled to almost nothing, a desperate threat to his lifestyle.ĚýMacarthurĚýhastily conceived a He would commit bank robbery, of the kind that had become frightfully common in Dublin at the time. But his plan spun swiftly out of control, and he needlessly killed two innocent people. The ensuing manhunt, arrest, and conviction amounted to one of the most infamous political scandals in modern Irish history, contributing to the eventual collapse of a government.

Author Mark O'Connell spentĚýcountless hours in conversation with Macarthur—interviews that veered from confession to evasion. Through their tense exchanges and O’Connell’s independent reporting, a pair of narratives a riveting account of Macarthur's crimes and a study of the hazy line between truth and invention. We come to see not only the enormity of the murders but the damage that’s inflicted when a life is rendered into story.

At once propulsive and searching, A Thread of Violence is a hard look at a brutal act, its subterranean origins, and the long shadow it casts. It offers a haunting and insightful examination of the lies we tell ourselves—and the lengths we'll go to preserve them.]]> 283 Mark O'Connell 0385547625 Stef 0 to-read 3.72 2023
author: Mark O'Connell
name: Stef
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 63834978 An intimate, sharply funny novel about a couple heading toward their wedding, and the three friends who may draw them apart

Meet Celine and Luke--for all intents and purposes the happy couple. Luke (a serial cheater) and Celine (more inter­ested in piano than in domestic life) plan to marry in a year. Archie (the best man) should be moving on from his love for Luke and up the corporate ladder, but he finds himself utterly stuck. Phoebe (the bridesmaid and Celine’s sister) just wants to get to the bottom of Luke’s frequent unexplained disappearances. And Vivian (a wedding guest), as the only one with any emotional distance, observes her friends like ants in a colony. As the wedding approaches and these five lives intersect, each will find themselves looking for a path to their happily ever after--but does it lie at the end of an aisle?]]> 240 Naoise Dolan Stef 0 to-read 3.34 2023
author: Naoise Dolan
name: Stef
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61778428 For fans of Shuggie Bain and A Little Life, Juno Loves Legs is the epic and heartbreaking story of a young friendship set in working-class Dublin in the 1980s

Juno Loves Legs is the story of two teens labeled as delinquents. Juno and "Legs" grow up on the same housing estate in Dublin, where spirited, intelligent Juno is ostracized for her poverty and Legs is persecuted for his sexuality; they find safety only in each other.

Set against the backdrop of Dublin in the 1980s, a place of political, social and religious change, the friends yearn for an unbound life and together they begin to fight to take up the space of who they truly are. As their defiance reverberates through their lives, the children are further alienated from their surrounding society through acts of bravery and cowardice, both their own and others�. Finding themselves as outsiders, they are feared, coveted and watched, but rarely truly seen.

Told through the eyes of Juno, we see the pair begin to navigate the political and oftentimes confusing adult world with honesty and intuition. A country emerging from a dark Catholicism into the wider world of possibilities. Who is invited into modernity and gentrification and who is left behind?

Caught between the rich depth of her intellect and the harsh reality of her life, we follow Juno as she begins to understand how divergent a life lived and a life thought can be.

Juno Loves Legs shows the frustration of feeling trapped in a life that is not yours and the ability of friendship to lift us out of our experiences and into a truer version of ourselves. It is a novel that reminds us that kindness, bravery, and love appear in places where they are not always expected and in forms not usually recognised, but with a potency that cannot be ignored.]]> 301 Karl Geary 1646221141 Stef 4 heartbreaking 4.09 2023
author: Karl Geary
name: Stef
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/11
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves:
review:
heartbreaking
]]> 59045629 The Virgin Suicides meets The Florida Project in this wildly original debut—a coming-of-age story about the crucible of girlhood, from a writer of rare and startling talent

We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones.

In Falls Landing, Florida—a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers—something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher's daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they see will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Through a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the "we" of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever.]]> 304 Dizz Tate 1646221680 Stef 4 3.11 2023
author: Dizz Tate
name: Stef
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/17
date added: 2023/04/17
shelves:
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]]> 61111034
A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America’s most original novelists, “a mesmerizing writer,� says Dave Eggers, “who demands to be read.”]]> 588 Mariana Enríquez 0451495144 Stef 0 to-read 4.07 2019
author: Mariana EnrĂ­quez
name: Stef
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61319761 A debut, interlinked collection of stories exploring the primal nature of women's grief--offering insight into the profound experience of loss and the absurd ways in which we seek control in an unruly world.

Seamlessly shifting between the speculative and the blindingly real, balancing the bizarre with the subtle brutality of the mundane, A Manual for How to Love Us is a tender portrait of women trying their best to survive, love, and find genuine meaning in the aftermath of loss.

In these unconventional and unpredictably connected stories, Erin Slaughter shatters the stereotype of the soft-spoken, sorrowful woman in distress, queering the domestic and honoring the feral in all of us. In each story, grieving women embrace their wildest impulses as they attempt to master their lives: one woman becomes a "gazer" at a fraternity house, another slowly moves into her otherworldly stained-glass art, a couple speaks only their basement's black box, and a throuple must decide what to do when one partner disappears.

The women in Erin Slaughter's stories suffer messy breaks, whisper secrets to the ghosts tangled in the knots of their hair, eat raw meat to commune with their inner wolves, and build deadly MLM schemes along the Gulf Coast.

Set across oft-overlooked towns in the American South, A Manual for How to Love Us spotlights women who are living on the brink and clinging to its precipitous edge. Lyrical and surprisingly humorous, A Manual for How to Love Us is an exciting debut that reveals the sticky complications of living in a body, in all its grotesquerie and glory.]]> 304 Erin Slaughter 0063230887 Stef 2
although, i thought this short story collection would be up my alley because it started off strong, but it unfortunately didn’t hold up. the stories were written well, but some were too speculative and flowery to occupy the space and time need. these stories feature women who are reflecting on their lives and future, the place they hold in their relationships, fear of the unknown, grief/loss that consumes them, trust, and the act of letting go.

some of my favorites were: anywhere, you too can cure your life, the box, nest, and instructions for assembly ]]> 3.49 2023
author: Erin Slaughter
name: Stef
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/03/17
date added: 2023/03/17
shelves:
review:
thank you netgalley!

although, i thought this short story collection would be up my alley because it started off strong, but it unfortunately didn’t hold up. the stories were written well, but some were too speculative and flowery to occupy the space and time need. these stories feature women who are reflecting on their lives and future, the place they hold in their relationships, fear of the unknown, grief/loss that consumes them, trust, and the act of letting go.

some of my favorites were: anywhere, you too can cure your life, the box, nest, and instructions for assembly
]]> 11337 The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change—in painful, devastating ways.

With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.]]> 216 Toni Morrison Stef 4 4.13 1970
author: Toni Morrison
name: Stef
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/05
date added: 2023/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> 6936382 beautiful, Étienne has it all...including a serious girlfriend.

But in the City of Light, wishes have a way of coming true. Will a year of romantic near-misses end with their long-awaited French kiss?]]> 372 Stephanie Perkins 0525423273 Stef 0 to-read 3.96 2010
author: Stephanie Perkins
name: Stef
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 3636 208 Lois Lowry 0385732554 Stef 0 to-read 4.12 1993
author: Lois Lowry
name: Stef
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 5470 328 George Orwell Stef 0 to-read 4.15 1949
author: George Orwell
name: Stef
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 39027329 222 Dana Green 0997292482 Stef 0 to-read 4.73
author: Dana Green
name: Stef
average rating: 4.73
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60880813
When Clare meets Tabitha, a charismatic, beautiful, and intimidatingly rich girl from her art history class, she knows she’s destined to become friends with her and her exclusive circle: raffish Samuel, shrewd Ava, and pragmatic Imogen. She is immediately drawn into their libertine world of sophisticated dinner parties and summers in France. The new life she always envisioned for herself has seemingly begun. But as Clare starts to realize just what her friends are capable of, it’s already too late—because they’ve taken the plunge. They’re so close to attaining everything they want, and there’s no going back.

Reimagining the classic themes of obsession and ambition with an original and sinister edge, The Things We Do to Our Friends is a seductive thriller about the toxic battle between those who have and those who covet, between the desire to truly belong and the danger of being truly known.]]> 336 Heather Darwent 0593497163 Stef 3
In Edinburgh, Scotland, Clare is starting university as an Art History student and trying to figure out how to befriend the elite while coming from a working class background. After slowly melding herself into the ideal prospect, she is seemingly accepted into a friend group consisting of 3 girls and 1 boy. All of whom talk in mysterious ways, never letting Clare know too much about any aspect of their life. Not that it matters as Clare is hiding a secret that will destroy her if anyone were to find out. This book pushes the boundaries of how far would you go for a friend and delves you into a year of planning and orchestrating a grey area revenge plot that soon becomes a regretful one. The storyline jumps between present day and university Clare, while revealing bits and pieces of her pre-uni days as well. This provides us with the full picture of why Clare was willing to continue scheming with her friends even when she wanted to stop. It is reminiscent of The Divines by Ellie Eaton and worth the read.]]> 3.17 2023
author: Heather Darwent
name: Stef
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/11
date added: 2023/02/20
shelves:
review:
3.5

In Edinburgh, Scotland, Clare is starting university as an Art History student and trying to figure out how to befriend the elite while coming from a working class background. After slowly melding herself into the ideal prospect, she is seemingly accepted into a friend group consisting of 3 girls and 1 boy. All of whom talk in mysterious ways, never letting Clare know too much about any aspect of their life. Not that it matters as Clare is hiding a secret that will destroy her if anyone were to find out. This book pushes the boundaries of how far would you go for a friend and delves you into a year of planning and orchestrating a grey area revenge plot that soon becomes a regretful one. The storyline jumps between present day and university Clare, while revealing bits and pieces of her pre-uni days as well. This provides us with the full picture of why Clare was willing to continue scheming with her friends even when she wanted to stop. It is reminiscent of The Divines by Ellie Eaton and worth the read.
]]> 60741808 An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos—and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor.

It’s 1998 and Isabel Rosen, the only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire. Desperate to shed her working-class roots and still mourning the death of her mother four years earlier, Isabel has always felt like an outsider at Wilder but now, in her final semester, she believes she has found her place—until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the only other Jewish students on campus leaves her reeling.

Enter R. H. Connelly, a once-famous poet and Isabel’s writing professor, a man with secrets of his own. Connelly makes Isabel feel seen, beautiful, talented: the woman she longs to become. His belief in her ignites a belief in herself, and the two begin an affair that shakes the foundation of who Isabel thinks she is, for better and worse. As the lives of the adults around her slowly come apart, Isabel discovers that the line between youth and adulthood is less defined than she thought.

A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Daisy Alpert Florin's My Last Innocent Year is a timely and wise portrait of a young woman learning to trust her voice and move toward independence while recognizing the beauty and grit of where she came from.]]> 304 Daisy Alpert Florin 1250857031 Stef 3
Also, as someone who hates reading about English majors, I didn’t have a problem with this novel!]]> 3.70 2023
author: Daisy Alpert Florin
name: Stef
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/19
date added: 2023/02/20
shelves:
review:
Isabel doesn’t really ever consent to anything in her life and tends to live in secrecy, so it is no shock when a teacher propositions her in a way that makes it appear like she is in control. He coaxes her to provide him with consent, not realizing that he still holds the power in the “relationship�. He gets to choose where it happens, when it happens, and when it ends just by giving Isabel enough false hope to continue their relationship in secrecy. A few situations led up to this - Nev, another Jewish student, engages in nonconsensual sex with her and her best friend fills in the gaps of her story resulting in spray painting the word “Rapist� across his door. While this is happening, she is grappling with the fact that her thesis advisor might be abusing his wife (the head of the English department) amidst their ongoing divorce and custody battle. More and more people keep coming to Isabel with information about their lives or others that isn’t really her business and she just soaks it up in silence. No one stops to think about what she wants, and honestly neither does she. Throughout this novel, we see Isabel as a person we may have known, heard about, or been ourselves at some point in our lives. Trying to go with the flow until everything comes crashing down and we can finally make a decision we know is the right one.

Also, as someone who hates reading about English majors, I didn’t have a problem with this novel!
]]> 63898157 An engrossing, page-turning story about an introverted student and the mysterious older woman whose unexpected interest in her sparks an insidious, all-consuming love affair.
Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived for her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for an unfamiliar city. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. Chatty, confident Clara from down the hall, who wants to be her friend; intense, determined Rachel from her poetry class, who is going to be a writer. Natalie doesn't know what she wants. She reads advice listicles and watches videos online and thinks about how to fit in, how to really become someone.

Just as she is trying to find her footing, she meets Nora, an older woman who takes an unexpected interest in her. Natalie is drawn magnetically into Nora's orbit. She begins spending more and more of her time off campus at Nora's home, enveloped by the intensity of her feelings and the version of adulthood she imagines Nora leads. Worried about how her floormates will react to news of her relationship with a woman, Natalie explains her absence by inventing a secret boyfriend called Paul; she carefully protects the intimate, sacred adulthood she is building for herself. But when it becomes clear that Nora is lying, too, her secrets begin to take an alarming shape in Natalie's life, even as Natalie tries to look away. What, or who, is Nora hiding?

The Adult is a startlingly gorgeous and perceptive debut novel examining identity, love, insecurity, desire, and deceit.]]> 312 Bronwyn Fischer 103900296X Stef 0 to-read 3.74 2023
author: Bronwyn Fischer
name: Stef
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 17286683 '...And then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.' Harriet Tubman

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five men in her life, to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth--and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.

Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue high education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity.]]> 256 Jesmyn Ward 160819521X Stef 0 4.28 2013
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Stef
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2023/02/12
date added: 2023/02/12
shelves:
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]]> 23453099 So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys� prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.]]> 260 Ottessa Moshfegh 1594206627 Stef 1 terrible 3.57 2015
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Stef
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2023/02/03
date added: 2023/02/03
shelves:
review:
terrible
]]> 50042494
A new relationship couldn't have come at a better time - her thirties have not been the liberating, uncomplicated experience she was sold. Everywhere she turns, she is reminded of time passing and opportunities dwindling. Friendships are fading, ex-boyfriends are moving on and, worse, everyone's moving to the suburbs. There's no solace to be found in her family, with a mum who's caught in a baffling mid-life makeover and a beloved dad who is vanishing in slow-motion into dementia.

Dolly Alderton's debut novel is funny and tender, filled with whip-smart observations about relationships, family, memory, and how we live now.]]> 352 Dolly Alderton 0241434548 Stef 3
aging crisis, situationships, friendships dissolving. brutal.]]> 3.86 2020
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Stef
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/25
date added: 2023/01/25
shelves:
review:
3.5

aging crisis, situationships, friendships dissolving. brutal.
]]> 60417483 Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.

Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast. By day she teaches at a parochial school; at night she fills in at her family's pub. There she meets Michael Agnew, a barrister who's made a name for himself defending IRA members. Against her better judgment - Michael is not only Protestant but older, and married - Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect.

As tender as it is unflinching, Trespasses is a heart-pounding, heart-rending drama of thwarted love and irreconcilable loyalties, in a place what you come from seems to count more than what you do, or whom you cherish. ]]> 304 Louise Kennedy 0593540891 Stef 0 to-read 3.92 2022
author: Louise Kennedy
name: Stef
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 63337133
For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.]]> Mona Awad Stef 0 to-read 3.58 2023
author: Mona Awad
name: Stef
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 75492257
Hannah and Finn have spent every Christmas together since college. Neither has anywhere else to go—Hannah’s parents died, and Finn’s disowned him when he came out. Their tradition of offbeat holiday adventures only grows more outrageous with time. When the pair starts their adult lives in New York City, they add stylish Priya and mysterious Theo to the group, solidifying a found family and sense of belonging they’ve always craved.

But now, when Finn announces a move to L.A., this Christmas may be their last. Hannah is terrified of losing the family she’s built for herself, even as her boyfriend nudges her toward commitment. Meanwhile, Finn struggles with the things he’s about to leave behind—namely, his unexpressed feelings for Theo. Does growing up mean growing apart? This Christmas the changes these friends fear may be exactly what they need. . . .]]> 368 Becca Freeman 0143138030 Stef 0 to-read 3.75 2023
author: Becca Freeman
name: Stef
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62679690 Finding the truth seems impossible when her own dark past has her seeing lies everywhere she looks�

From the outside, criminal psychiatrist Dr. Madeline Pine’s life appears picture-perfect—she has a beautiful family, a successful mental health practice, and a growing reputation as an expert in female violence. But when she's called to help investigate a mysterious death at a boarding school for troubled teenage girls, Madeline hesitates. She’s been through tragic cases before, and the one she was entangled in last year nearly destroyed her�

Yet she can’t turn away when she hears about Charley Ridley. After Charley was found barefoot and in pajamas at the bottom of an icy ravine on campus, the police ruled her death a tragic accident. But the private investigator hired by her mother has his doubts. If it were Madeline’s daughter who died, she’d want to know why.

Arriving at the secluded campus in upstate New York, Madeline’s met by an unhelpful skeleton staff and the four other students staying on campus during winter break. Each seems to hold a piece of the puzzle. And everyone has secrets—Madeline included. But who would kill to protect them?

This stunning suspense debut is told with a narrative that intertwines with the transcript of an anonymous interview, beginning a twisting path where nothing—and no one—is what it seems. It’s sure to appeal to readers of Ruth Ware and Lucy Foley—fans of locked room mysteries and jaw-dropping twists.
]]> 408 Katie Garner 0369736362 Stef 0 to-read 3.36 2023
author: Katie Garner
name: Stef
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 63259070
When Francine’s estranged sister, Madeleine, returns to the manor after years away, she brings with her a story that threatens everything Francine has always believed. It is a tale of cruelty and desperation, of terror and unbearable heartache. And as Francine learns more about the darkness in her family’s past—and the role she may have played in it—she realizes that confronting the truth may mean losing what she holds most dear.]]> 368 Shannon Morgan 1496743881 Stef 0 to-read 3.74 2023
author: Shannon Morgan
name: Stef
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

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