That storyline drives Jason Mott's novel and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: since his novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.Throughout, these characters' stories build and build and as they converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art, and money, there always is the tragic story of a police shooting playing over and over on the news.Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably powerful, an electrifying high-wire act, ideal for book clubs, and the book Mott says he has been writing in his head for ten years, Hell of a Book in its final twists truly becomes its title.

    He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path.Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda’s uncle and keeper of the family’s history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo, who often solves his problems with a beer in his hand, doesn’t think he can live up to.The Five Wounds is a miraculous debut novel from a writer whose stories have been hailed as “legitimate masterpieces” (New York Times). Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the final page, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.

    Richards spends his days monitoring small development projects and his nights attending embassy cocktail parties and bedding various visiting American women and diplomats’ wives.The time is the early 1980s, when the American Empire has begun to tentatively flex its muscles once again. Kutar is a diplomatic backwater, a former British colony, barely a blip on the State Department’s radar back in Washington. For centuries desultory tribal conflict has flared sporadically in the arid hills hundreds of miles from the coastal capital of Laradan, and as the book opens rumors of a new skirmish there reach the city’s inhabitants. As always, the residents of Laradan ignore the stories, but this time something is different: The Americans decide to do something about it. As any casual student of geopolitics might guess, this is bad news for the people of Kutar. Urged on by a Kurtzian American military advisor named Colonel Munn, the little-used Kutaran army marches into the hills. In quick order they are decimated, and with stunning rapidity the heights above Laradan are occupied by a rebel force possessed of the government’s abandoned artillery. Soon the Americans, and all other foreigners, are ordered from the country and leave the people of Laradan to their fate. For his own deeply personal reasons, David chooses to stay on in the besieged city, and moves into the Moonlight Hotel, a crumbling colonial dinosaur. There he is joined by an eclectic assortment of other foreigners, including a senior British diplomat, an acid-tongued Romanian countess, and Amira, an aristocratic young woman who previously spurned David’s romantic advances. Together, this small community tries to maneuver over the radically-changed landscape of the beleaguered city, while holding out hope that the outside world might yet come to its rescue. Then the shooting begins in earnest.

    Beat him to death with a tree branch after he threatened to rape her. But what started as self-defense became problematic for two reasons. First, she killed Robert Sims after he’d been rendered completely defenseless. And second, she inadvertently left her fingerprints at the scene. Allie is young, beautiful, the smartest person in any room. But she’s also been diagnosed as clinically insane. As her past catches up with her and her marriage starts to crumble, Allie is determined to survive at all costs. Size Matters is a taut, compelling novel that teaches us never to underestimate a woman with nothing to lose. PRELIMINARY REVIEWS: “Size Matters is so full of twists and turns and surprises I couldn’t have flipped the pages faster if you paid me! This novel surprised and delighted and kept me shaking my head time and again. Fans of Donovan Creed should be aware that he and Callie make a brief appearance that furthers their saga.” “‘I’ve done bad things,’ says Allie McPherson, ‘but that doesn’t make me a bad person.’ Well, that’s one opinion!” “This book is crazy! There are twists and turns on virtually every page! While I consider myself an expert on Locke novels, I have to admit he took me on a wild ride that made me guess wrong every single time.” “Size Matters is a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino. From start to finish I was shocked, surprised, and hopelessly entertained.”

    She is the spitting image of his college girlfriend, Marissa Minor, who died in a campus house fire twenty years earlier. But when Nick tries to speak to her, she acts skittish and rushes off.The next morning the police arrive at Nick’s house and show him a photo of the woman from the store. She’s been found dead, murdered in a local motel, with Nick’s name and address on a piece of paper in her pocket.Convinced there's a connection between the two women, Nick enlists the help of his college friend Laurel Davidson to investigate the events leading up to the night of Marissa’s death. But the young woman’s murder is only the beginning...and the truths Nick uncovers may make him wish he never doubted the lies.

    They've lived down the street from each other their whole lives. But they don't really know each other—at least, not until Juliette's mom and Abram's dad have a torrid affair that culminates in a deadly car crash. Sharing the same subdivision is uncomfortable, to say the least. They don't speak.Fast-forward to the neighborhood pharmacy, a year later. Abram decides to say hello. Then he decides to invite Juliette to Taco Bell.To her surprise as well as his, she agrees. And the real love story begins.

    Raised by remarkable parents, he has grown up happy and grounded, uninterested in his "other parents" or in why they might have had to give him up.Having lost her father at fifteen, and still suffering a terrible relationship with "mother", Eva has more issues than she cares to admit, and it falls to an unexpected visit by two policemen to uncover a secret she has kept from her husband since the first day they met.With the past at last explained, and the worst of it now apparently behind them, today has been a day of good news, which Eva is looking forward to sharing with the friends who have invited them to dinner. But their hosts seem to have very different plans for the evening, and the air is thick with tension as gradually the reason for their invitation begins to come out...Its satirical humor sometimes black and irreverent, POLK, HARPER & WHO is a contemporary tale of complex family relationships, of friendships being put to the test, and of imperfect London love within imperfect London lives.

    He is a fat man. A fat man with thin limbs, like an egg with tentacles. And life is not going well. He’s alone, idle, and on the brink of a medical crisis when a childhood acquaintance makes him an offer he can’t understand, can’t talk about, but ultimately can’t refuse. A week later, he finds himself in the wilds of Scotland, plunged into an eccentric community at war over a wind farm. He’s supposed to be a backer, but he has no idea what side he’s on, even though it may bag him a lot of money. All he wants is to look like a hero in front of the woman with the bright blue eyes who brought him here. To do so he must run the gauntlet of a family with many dark secrets, some dangerous hippies and their hallucinogenic potions, and the wilderness itself with all its threats and dangers. Whirligig is a raucous, joyous, often poignant comedy about the redemptive power of the countryside. Written with peerless wit, it’s a timely fable that takes its place within the tradition of the Great English Comic Novel. It’s The Wicker Man as told by P.G. Wodehouse.

    Complicating these feelings of abandonment, as Kirabo comes of age she feels the emergence of a mysterious second self, a headstrong and confusing force inside her at odds with her sweet and obedient nature.Seeking answers, Kirabo begins spending afternoons with Nsuuta, a local witch, trading stories and learning not only about this force inside her, but about the woman who birthed her, who she learns is alive but not ready to meet. Nsuuta also explains that Kirabo has a streak of the “first woman”—an independent, original state that has been all but lost to women.Kirabo’s journey to reconcile her rebellious origins, alongside her desire to reconnect with her mother and to honor her family’s expectations, is rich in the folklore of Uganda and an arresting exploration of what it means to be a modern girl in a world that seems determined to silence women. Makumbi’s unforgettable novel is a sweeping testament to the true and lasting connections between history, tradition, family, friends, and the promise of a different future.

    The Great War is over, Prohibition is in full swing, the Depression still years away, and Newport, Rhode Island's glittering "summer cottages" are inhabited by the gloriously rich families who built them.Attorney Adrian De la Noye is no stranger to Newport, having sheltered there during his misspent youth. Though he'd prefer to forget the place, he returns to revise the will of a well-heeled client. Bennett Chapman's offspring have the usual concerns about their father's much-younger fiancee. But when they learn of the old widower's firm belief that his first late wife, who "communicates" via seance, has chosen the beautiful Catherine Walsh for him, they're shocked. And for Adrian, encountering Catherine in the last place he saw her decades ago proves to be a far greater surprise.Still, De la Noye is here to handle a will, and he fully intends to do so--just as soon as he unearths every last secret, otherworldly or not, about the Chapmans, Catherine Walsh . . . and his own very fraught history.A skillful alchemy of social satire, dark humor, and finely drawn characters, Newport vividly brings to life the glitzy era of the 1920s.

    The Victorian house near the cliffs holds much more than painful memories, and when lightning strikes midnight, family secrets unfold. She and her sisters have no choice but to work together, as they find strength they never knew they had . . . and face danger from a place they never knew existed.

     "Hello, my name is Tyler Tracer and I am falling apart. I am twenty-four years old, and I have no ability whatsoever to choose an occupation or a hair color." Meet Tyler, the singularly irresistible and straight-talking heroine of Sarahbeth Purcell's touching first novel. An incurable romantic, Tyler's chief obsessions include music, list-making -- and David, the man who broke her heart. Despite an exhaustively detailed list of reasons for why she should just forget about David once and for all -- including (but by no means limited to) chronic illness, terminal self-absorption, and geographical inaccessibility -- Tyler remains hopelessly hooked on him. Hence the wild ride she embarks upon in the wake of her father's death, a ride that takes her from her hometown in Tennessee to sunny Los Angeles, all in hopes of saving David from his ominous take on life. This hilarious and dark cross-country expedition finds our young heroine negotiating the universally perilous terrain of sex, love, and relationships with uncommon verve, wit, and more than a little recklessness. Along the way, Tyler discovers, among other things, the uniquely redemptive powers of roadkill, the fact that enduring love tends to blossom in the most unexpected and unlikeliest places, and, above all, that nothing can stop her from making her own rules and mapping out her own life. Not even herself. A joyous triumph of a debut to which readers will respond with a sense of instant recognition, Sarahbeth Purcell's Love Is the Drug spins a story of bold living and loving that crackles with energy and innovation.

    Along the way she weathers unplanned losses of altitude, air pressure, and landing gear. With the help of a squad of loyal, funny, wise friends and massage therapists, she learns to sort truth from self-deception, self-involvement from self-possession.At last, having found a new partner “who loves Don DeLillo and the NHL” and a daughter “who needs you to teach her to dive and to laugh at herself”—not to mention two dogs and two horses—“staying home becomes more of an option. Maybe.”

    The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow, Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora's and an Iraq War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself.As the characters--deeply divided by race, religion, and class--tell their stories, connections among them emerge, even as Driss's family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love, messy and unpredictable, is born.

    But the day Emily receives the letter and composes a response–I know who you are. In fact, I remember you from a bunch of times–is also the day that Robert Kennedy is shot. In Minnesota, even as the tumultuous summer of 1968 has begun, first love cares little for matters of time and place. William and Emily fall hard, despite the fact that he and his family are determined to wrestle with the system while she and hers are conservative, God-fearing Catholics. Together, the young lovers grow into each other and decide to escape to the wilderness to start anew. Left behind to grapple with the shifting mores of the nation and the sundering of their families, the Lowrys and the Byrnes must search for both their children and their own lost innocence.Masterfully rendering both young love and the unrest of the 1960s Robert Clark has crafted a work that is at once intimate and grand.