**The feel-good underdog story of the first American swimmer to win Olympic gold, set against the turbulent rebirth of the modern Games, that “bring[s] to life an inspiring figure and illuminate[s] an overlooked chapter in America’s sports history” (The Wall Street Journal)“Once or twice in a decade, one of these stories . . . like Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken [or] Daniel Brown’s The Boys in the Boat . . . captures the imagination of the public. . . . Add...

**The feel-good underdog story of the first American swimmer to win Olympic gold, set against the turbulent rebirth of the modern Games, that “bring[s] to life an inspiring figure and illuminate[s] an overlooked chapter in America’s sports history” (The Wall Street Journal)“Once or twice in a decade, one of these stories . . . like Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken [or] Daniel Brown’s The Boys in the Boat . . . captures the imagination of the public. . . . Add...

Henfield Prize–winner and brilliant newcomer Sara Freeman debuts with an intoxicating, compact novel about a woman who walks out of her life and washes up in a seaside town.After a sudden, devastating loss, Mara flees her family and ends up adrift in a wealthy seaside town. Mired in her grief, Mara detaches from the outside world and spends her days of self-imposed exile scrounging for food and swimming inthe ocean at night. As her money runs out and the tourist season comes...

In visceral, embodied prose, Fragoza's imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. A young woman returns home from college, only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown town with no future. A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for ingesting grandma's letters has extended to taking bites of her actu...

“Is me—Bob. Bob Marley.” Reincarnated as homeless Fall-down man, Bob Marley sleeps in a clock tower built on the site of a lynching in Half Way Tree, Kingston. The ghosts of Marcus Garvey and King Edward VII are there too, drinking whiskey and playing solitaire. No one sees that Fall-down is Bob Marley, no one but his long-ago love, the deaf woman, Leenah, and, in the way of this otherworldly book, when Bob steps into the street each day, five years have passed. Jah ways are myste...

Anovel of great humanity, compassion and astonishing immediacy, this uniquedebut portrays the emotional reality of contemporary life in the West Bank andthe irreconcilable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A collage of narrative voicesand different points of view are woven around the murder of two young people,one Israeli and one Palestinian.Brave and bold, this gorgeouslywritten work of fiction introduces a large cast of characters in a settin...

**“A debut story collection of the rarest kind ... you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel." —Entertainment WeeklyFresh, intimate stories of women’s lives from an extraordinary new literary voice, laying bare the unexpected beauty and irony in contemporary life**A college freshman, traveling home, strikesup an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son’s wedding, her own life unraveling as his...

Marrying the sharp insights of Jenny Offill with the dark humor of Maria Semple, Motherest is an inventive and moving coming-of-age novel that captures the pain of fractured family life, the heat of new love, and the particular magic of the female friendship -- all through the lens of a fraying daughter-mother bond.It's the early 1990s, and Agnes is running out of people she can count on. A new college student, she is caught between the broken home she leaves behind and the wildern...

Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight toBerlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comicmeditati...

A boldly candid, raw portrait of a young woman's search for meaning and purpose in an indifferent worldPurposefully aimless, self-destructive, and impulsively in and out of love, Elsie is a young woman who feels lost. She's in a tumultuous relationship, is stuck in a dead-end job, and has a relentless, sharp intelligence that’s at odds with her many bad decisions. When her initial attempts to improve her life go awry, Elsie decides that a dramatic change is the onl...

"Debut author Garza skillfully links brilliantly crafted episodes to create an unforgettable community in Galveston, TX...Indeed, staying well-tuned to Garza’s work earns enduring rewards."— Booklist (starred review)"These rich performances, a chorus of different tones and accents, create a beautiful tapestry of a complicated city and the people who call it home." - AudioFile Magazine"Beaut...

A stunning debut novel about a young undocumented Peruvian woman fighting to keep her family afloat in New York City.Ana Falcón, along with her husband Lucho and their two young children, has fled the economic and political strife of Peru for a chance at a new life in New York City in the 1990s. Being undocumented, however, has significantly curtailed the family’s opportunities: Ana is indebted to a loan shark who calls herself Mama, and is stretched thin by unceas...