In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor and drinks his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He's entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his mother in Houston, whose preference for the son's oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they last saw each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.

With only the son's cat, Taro, to mediate, the two of them bristle at each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life steers them in unexpected directions--the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner and the son to a cautious acquaintance with a new patron of the bar--they begin to see each other more clearly. During meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, mother and son try as best they can to determine where "home" really is--and whether they can even find it in one another.

Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington's Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others.

Dr. Carrie Vogel's heart is shattered when her groundbreaking medical research is stolen and falsely credited to her ex-fiancé. With years of diligent work lost, she grapples with the disastrous turn of her career and leans on her faith for strength. When she learns that her Pinkerton friend Spencer Duval is on a justice-driven mission to her hometown of Cheyenne, she agrees to an arranged marriage to provide him with a cover story. But merely pretending to be in love with Spencer becomes increasingly difficult the more time she spends with him.

Spencer is determined to apprehend the ruthless murderer who killed his father years ago, but his quest ignites unexpected emotions--both for Carrie and about the desire for revenge that has dominated his life. As the web of suspects tightens, their futures hang in the balance, and they must learn to trust God's plan as unexpected love takes flight.

Return to Cheyenne, Wyoming, with bestselling author Tracie Peterson for a journey of healing and forgiveness in this exquisite western frontier romance that will appeal to readers of faith-filled stories and When Calls the Heart.

Mallory Fontaine is a fraud. Though she comes from a long line of witches, the only magic she possesses is the ability to see ghosts, which is rarely as useful as one would think. She and her sister have maintained the family business, eking out a paltry living by selling bogus spells to gullible buyers and conducting tours of the infamous mansion where the first of the Saphir murders took place.

Mallory is a self-proclaimed expert on Count Bastien Saphir--otherwise known as Monsieur Le Bleu--who brutally killed three of his wives more than a century ago. But she never expected to meet Bastien's great-great grandson and heir to the Saphir estate. Armand is handsome, wealthy, and convinced that the Fontaine Sisters are as talented as they claim. The perfect mark. When he offers Mallory a large sum of money to rid his ancestral home of Le Bleu's ghost, she can't resist. A paid vacation at Armand's country manor? It's practically a dream come true, never mind the ghosts of murdered wives and the monsters that are as common as household pests.

But when murder again comes to the House Saphir, Mallory finds herself at the center of the investigation--and she is almost certain the killer is mortal. If she has any hope of cashing in on the payment she was promised, she'll have to solve the murder and banish the ghost, all while upholding the illusion of witchcraft.

But that all sounds relatively easy compared to her biggest challenge: learning to trust her heart. Especially when the person her heart wants the most might be a murderer himself.

A thrilling and ominously prophetic debut set in a world when Earth and its resources have been pushed to breaking point, giving rise to a revolutionary--and highly controversial--procedure in which two people's consciousness can be combined to exist in one body.

How far would you go to never say goodbye?

Laurie is sixty-five and living with Alzheimer's. Her daughter Amelia, a once fiery and strong-willed activist, can't bear to see her mother's mind fade. Faced with the reality of losing her forever, Amelia signs them up to take part in the world's first experimental merging process for Alzheimer's patients, in which Laurie's ailing mind will be transferred into Amelia's healthy body and their consciousness will be blended as one.

Soon Amelia and Laurie join the opaque and mysterious group of other merge participants: teenage Lucas, who plans to merge with his terminally ill brother Noah; Ben, who will merge with his pregnant fiancée Annie; and Jay, whose merging partner is his addict daughter Lara. As they prepare to move to The Village, a luxurious rehabilitation center for those who have merged, they quickly begin to question whether everything is really as it seems.

An exhilarating, immersive debut from an astonishing new voice, The Merge is a personal story of love, family, and sacrifice, as well as a thought-provoking examination of the limits of control, resistance, and freedom in our modern world.

Luca Matius has one purpose--to carry on the family name, maintaining its presence in the Forum once his powerful and cruel uncle dies. But his noviceship with the city's Philosopher places him in the middle of a catastrophe that will alter the destiny of his people.

Maris Casperia was raised amidst the strategic maneuvers of the Citadel's inner workings, and she knows what her future holds--a lifetime of service to a corrupt city. But her years of serving as a novice to the last Priestess who possesses the stolen magic of the Old War has made her envision a different kind of future for the city. When she meets Luca, a fated chain of events is set into motion that will divinely entangle their lives.

As a secret comes to light and throws the city into chaos, Luca and Maris hatch a plot to create a calculated alliance that could tip the scales of power. But when an execution forces Luca to become the symbol of rebellion, he and Maris are thrown onto opposite sides of a holy war. As their fates diverge, they learn they are at the center of a story the gods are writing. And even if they can find their way back to each other, there may be nothing left.

A deadly rivalry.

A chilling secret.

One woman who can decipher the truth.

On a frigid, windswept day in Scotland's Western Isles, Eleanor Bruton's body is discovered on the shore. To her family Eleanor was an ordinary middle-aged woman. She did flower arrangements and plumped kneeler cushions at church. Little did they know she was harboring a dark and all-consuming secret. A scrap of fraying embroidery that seems worthless at first glance.

For over a century, two rival organizations of women have gone to deadly lengths to secure the valuable artifact in the hopes of finding the original medieval manuscript from which it was torn. The Order of St. Katherine: devoted to the belief that women must pull strings in the shadows to exercise control. And the Fellowship of the Larks, determined to amass as many overt positions of power for women as possible...so long as their methods of doing so never come to light.

When Dr. Anya Brown garners international attention for her translation of the cryptic Folio 9, she is handpicked by Diana Cornish, a professor and high-ranking member of the Fellowship, to join the exclusive Institute of Manuscript Studies in St. Andrews. Unbeknownst to Anya she's been recruited at great personal danger to translate ancient texts that the Fellowship believes critical to their mission.  

Meanwhile at Scotland Yard, Detective Constable Clio Spicer begins a private investigation into the death of Eleanor Bruton.

As all the women grow further entangled in this ancient web, circumstances spin wildly out of control and their lives may be in grave danger.

Perfect for fans of Alex Michaelides and Ruth Ware, The Burning Library is the story of a centuries-old secret set to divide and consume those who seek to unearth it.

It is September 1974. Two men meet in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realizing the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini's Casanova. A young apprentice is just what he needs.

He sweeps Nicholas to Rome and introduces him to the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova's Venice will be ingeniously assembled. In the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini's horrifying fable of fascism.

But Nicholas has a secret, and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amid the rising tensions of Italy's Years of Lead, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he doesn't intend.

Olivia Laing's The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller set in the dream factory of cinema. It is a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

When Ebun gives birth to her daughter, Eniiyi, on the day they bury her cousin Monife, there is no denying the startling resemblance between the child and the dead woman. So begins the belief, fostered and fanned by the entire family, that Eniiyi is the actual reincarnation of Monife, fated to follow in her footsteps in all ways, including that tragic end.

There is also the matter of the family curse: "No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace..." which has been handed down from generation to generation, breaking hearts and causing three generations of abandoned Falodun women to live under the same roof. 

When Eniiyi falls in love with the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family's history. As several women in her family have done before, she ill-advisedly seeks answers in older, darker spiritual corners of Lagos, demanding solutions. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak? Or can she break the pattern once and for all, not only avoiding the spiral that led Monife to her lonely death, but liberating herself from all the family secrets and unspoken traumas that have dogged her steps since before she could remember?

Cursed Daughters is a brilliant cocktail of modernity and superstition, vibrant humor and hard-won wisdom, romantic love and familial obligation. With its unforgettable cast of characters, it asks us what it means to be given a second chance and how to live both wisely and well with what we've been given.

Excited to return to Minnesota and reconnect with her childhood sweetheart Alec, Dani discovers her nerdy best friend is now a hunky hockey star, and only a fake-dating situation may truly reunite them.

December 1962: In a village deep in the English countryside, two neighboring couples begin the day. Local doctor Eric Parry commences his rounds in the village while his pregnant wife, Irene, wanders the rooms of their old house, mulling over the space that has grown between the two of them

On the farm nearby lives Irene's mirror image: witty but troubled Rita Simmons is also expecting. She spends her days trying on the idea of being a farmer's wife, but her head still swims with images of a raucous past that her husband, Bill, prefers to forget.

When Rita and Irene meet across the bare field between their houses, a clock starts. There is still affection in both their homes; neither marriage has yet to be abandoned. But when the ordinary cold of December gives way--ushering in violent blizzards of the harshest winter in living memory--so do the secret resentments harbored in all four lives.

If you loved Rocky and her family on vacation on Cape Cod, wait until you join them at home two years later. (And if this is your first meeting with this crew, get ready to laugh and cry-and relate.) Rocky, still anxious, nostalgic, and funny, is living in Western Massachusetts with her husband Nick and their daughter Willa, who's back home after college. Their son, Jamie, has taken a new job in New York, and Mort, Rocky's widowed father, has moved in. It all couldn't be more ridiculously normal...until Rocky finds herself obsessed with a local accident that only tangentially affects them-and with a medical condition that, she hopes, won't affect them at all.

When New York architect Tate Donovan arrives in Cape Cod to design his best friend's summer home, he is hoping to make a fresh start. Recently discharged from an upscale psychiatric facility where he was treated for acute depression, he is still wrestling with the pain of losing his beloved sister. Sylvia's deathbed revelation--that she can see spirits who are still tethered to the living world, a gift that runs in their family--sits uneasily with Tate, who struggles to believe in more than what reason can explain. But when he takes up residence at a historic bed-and-breakfast on the Cape, he encounters a beautiful young woman named Wren who will challenge every assumption he has about his logical and controlled world.

Tate and Wren find themselves forging an immediate connection, one that neither has ever experienced before. But Tate gradually discovers that below the surface of Wren's idyllic small-town life, hatred, jealousy, and greed are festering, threatening their fragile relationship just as it begins to blossom. Tate realizes that in order to free Wren from an increasingly desperate fate, he will need to unearth the truth about her past before time runs out . . . a quest that will make him doubt whether we can ever believe the stories we tell about ourselves, and the laws that govern our existence. Love--while transformative--can sometimes be frightening.

Devon Darcy's reputation precedes her. As a highly sought-after portrait artist, she seems to have the ability to peer into the souls of her subjects and then capture them on canvas. But the world doesn't know about the devastating losses she has endured, first as an orphan, then as a far-too-young widow.

When entrepreneur Charles Mackenzie Taylor sees her at a New York gallery event, he is instantly haunted by her beauty and her talent. Having lost his mother when he was thirteen, and still living in the cold shadow of his late banker father's disapproval, Charlie has given up on love. He's resigned himself to a loveless marriage to avoid the inconvenience of divorce.

But Devon awakens something in him across that crowded gallery, and she is in turn intrigued by Charlie. He approaches her to paint his portrait, and while her schedule is booked for many months before she can accommodate him, with the electricity between them palpable.

When they encounter each other over the summer in the Hamptons, their connection deepens as they each release years of pent-up emotions and unfulfilled longing. But the ghosts of their pasts are not easily put to rest. Charlie wrestles with his fear of real intimacy for the first time in his life, while Devon struggles with her fear of abandonment. And after an accident endangers Devon's career, they must decide together what their future holds.

Danielle Steel's sensitive portrait of two successful people who have built walls around themselves is a wise chronicle of the rocky path to true courage and connection.

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

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

Now she's sure of nothing, caught between two realities. Believe in the future, and she might save the world. Believe in her husband and doctors' plans for her treatment, and she might save herself. She needs answers, but to get them she'll have to harness the darkness inside her as she risks her freedom, her mind, and ultimately her life in a heart-stopping quest for the truth.

There's always been something wrong with Charlie Hall. Crooked from the day she was born. Never met a bad decision she wasn't willing to double down on. She may be good enough to steal a shadow from a tower, but will she be good enough to steal back a heart?