**In this riveting, heartfelt debut, a young woman assumes a new name to escape her dark past and find the redemption she desperately seeks.“It’s impossible not to root for this strong, willful girl as she finds her place in the world and for her brother as he tries to make sense of it.”—Kirkus Reviews**“Charming, touching, and a host of other adjectives not often associated with a murderous thirteen-year-old.”—BooklistVenus Black ...

**From the bestselling author of The Postcard and How To Be Parisian Wherever You Are, this unique book charts Françoise's Sagan journey to publication for her legendary novel, Bonjour Tristesse.**Before Françoise Sagan the literary icon, there was Françoise Quoirez, an eighteen-year-old Parisian girl, who wrote a novel and needed a publisher for it. This intimate narrative details the months in 1954 leading up to the publication of the legendary Bonjour Tris...

From the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author, reflections on gardening, art, literature, and lifePenelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst a...

**In this riveting, heartfelt debut, a young woman assumes a new name to escape her dark past and find the redemption she desperately seeks.“It’s impossible not to root for this strong, willful girl as she finds her place in the world and for her brother as he tries to make sense of it.”—Kirkus Reviews**“Charming, touching, and a host of other adjectives not often associated with a murderous thirteen-year-old.”—BooklistVenus Black ...

Two decades before the Civil War, a middle-class farmer named Samuel Maddox lies on his deathbed. Elsewhere in his Virginia home, a young woman named Kitty knows her life is about to change. She is one of the Maddox family's slaves—and Samuel's biological daughter. When Samuel's wife, Mary, inherits her husband’s property, she will own Kitty, too, along with Kitty's three small children.Already in her fifties and with no children of her own, Mary Maddox has struggled to accept her ...

Until 1894 there were no female sport stars, no product endorsement deals, and no young mothers with the chutzpah to circle the globe on a bicycle. Annie Kopchovsky changed all of that.Annie was a Jewish immigrant and working mother of three living in a Boston tenement with her husband, a peddler. This was as close to the American dream as she was likely to get—until she became part of what one newspaper called "one of the most novel wagers ever made": a high-stakes bet between two...

Elyse Schein had always known she was adopted, but it wasn't until her mid-thirties while living in Paris that she searched for her biological mother. What she found instead was shocking: She had an identical twin sister. What's more, after being separated as infants, she and her sister had been, for a time, part of a secret study on separated twins. Paula Bernstein, a married writer and mother living in New York, also knew she was adopted, but had no inclination to find her birth mother. ...

A school shooting in snowbound Vermont; an American journalist beheaded in war-torn Syria; a passenger jet exploding in the Thai jungle—everything connects to Kate Swift, CIA assassin turned whistleblower, on the run from a sinister intelligence unit.With her six-year-old daughter, Suzie, she flees across the Canadian border to begin a perilous journey to Berlin and then Thailand in search of the only man who can keep them alive: Harry Hook, a disgraced ex–CIA case officer living r...

For fans of Dave Eggers and Kelly Link, an exhilarating collection of stories that explores the mysterious, often dangerous forces that shape our lives—from censorship and terrorism to technology and online dating.Spanning centuries, continents, and a diverse set of characters, these alluringly strange stories are united by each character’s struggle with fate. In a secret, subterranean world beneath the prairie of the Old West, a homesteader risks her life in searc...

How well do you really know your best friend?Kat Grant and Alice Campbell have a friendship forged in shared confidences and long lunches lubricated by expensive wine. Though they’re very different women—the artsy socialite and the struggling suburbanite—they’re each other’s rocks. But even rocks crumble under pressure. Like when Kat’s financier husband, Howard, plunges to his death from the second-floor balcony of their South Florida mansion.Howard was a j...

Debut novelist Paul Robertson delivers a critically acclaimed page turner that thrusts an idealistic young man into the swirling vortex of a corrupt empire. When New England's premier powerbroker dies, his 28-year-old son Jason is surprised to find he is the sole heir. At first, Jason angrily rejects this billion-dollar bequest. But he's gradually seduced by the very power and prestige he despises. When he finally starts to right past wrongs, however, a series of murders sends him fleeing ...

Dear Libby, It occurs to me that you and your two children have been living with your mother for—Dear Lord!—two whole years, and I'm writing to see if you'd like to be rescued.The letter comes out of the blue, and just in time for Libby Moran, who—after the sudden death of her husband, Danny—went to stay with her hypercritical mother. Now her crazy Aunt Jean has offered Libby an escape: a job and a place to live on her farm in the Texas Hill Country. Before she can talk he...