12 New Upcoming Books to Read This Spring 2020 –– May Release
Spring has arrived! And to celebrate the blooming flowers and warmer weather, guess what is your girl going to do? Peruse the new and upcoming books for May and buy even more books to fill my already overflowing bookshelf!
Is it smart? Definitely not.
But is it going to stop me from doing it? Nope.
These days, as I’ve decided to expand on the book genres that I read, I’ve found that I’ve also been adding more and more books into my to-read-list on the monthly. Which, again, is not a bad thing. However, when you have around 800 books that’s waiting to be read and you keep stockpiling and adding more and more books into it, you know you got a problem.
Just like I got a problem. But again, will that stop me from continuously adding newly released books into my bookshelves? Over my cold, dead body.
Five royal houses will hear the call to compete in the Trial for the dragon throne. A liar, a soldier, a servant, a thief, and a murderer will answer it. Who will win?
When the Emperor dies, the five royal houses of Etrusia attend the Call, where one of their own will be selected to compete for the throne. It is always the oldest child, the one who has been preparing for years to compete in the Trial. But this year is different. This year, these five outcasts will answer the call….
THE LIAR: Emilia must hide her dark magic or be put to death.
THE SOLDIER: Lucian is a warrior who has sworn to never lift a sword again.
THE SERVANT: Vespir is a dragon trainer whose skills alone will keep her in the game.
THE THIEF: Ajax knows that nothing is free–he must take what he wants.
THE MURDERER: Hyperia was born to rule and will stop at nothing to take her throne.
Camino Rios lives for the summers when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people…
In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal’s office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash.
Separated by distance—and Papi’s secrets—the two girls are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered.
And then, when it seems like they’ve lost everything of their father, they learn of each other.
”Excerpt”
I know too much of mud.
I know that when a street doesn’t have sidewalks
& water rises to flood the tile floors of your home,
learning mud is learning the language of survival.
I know too much of mud.
How Tía will snap at you with a dishrag if you track it inside.
How you need to raise the bed during hurricane season.
How mud will dry & cling stubbornly to a shoe.
Or a wall. To Vira Lata the dog & your exposed foot.
I know there’s mud that splatters as a motoconcho drives past.
Mud that suctions & slurps at the high heels
of the working girls I once went to school with.
Mud that softens, unravels into a road leading nowhere.
& mud got a mind of its own. Wants to enwrap
your penny loafers, hug up on your uniform skirt.
Press kisses to your knees & make you slip down to meet it.
“Don’t let it stain you,” Tía’s always said.
But can’t she see? This place we’re from
already has its prints on me.
I spend nights wiping clean the bottoms of my feet,
soiled rag over a bucket, undoing this mark of place.
To be from this barrio is to be made of this earth & clay:
dirt-packed, water-backed, third-world smacked:
they say, the soil beneath a country’s nail, they say.
Millie is running the show at the Cloak & Dagger, a swinging speakeasy in the French Quarter, while her aunt is out of town. The new year is just around the corner, and all of New Orleans is out to celebrate, but even wealthy partiers’ diamond earrings can’t outshine the real star of the night: the boy in the red dress. Marion is the club’s star performer and his fans are legion–if mostly underground.
When a young socialite wielding a photograph of Marion starts asking questions, Millie wonders if she’s just another fan. But then her body is found crumpled in the courtyard, dead from an apparent fall off the club’s balcony, and all signs point to Marion as the murderer. Millie knows he’s innocent, but local detectives aren’t so easily convinced.
As she chases clues that lead to cemeteries and dead ends, Millie’s attention is divided between the wry and beautiful Olive, a waitress at the Cloak & Dagger, and Bennie, the charming bootlegger who’s offered to help her solve the case. The clock is ticking for the fugitive Marion, but the truth of who the killer is might be closer than Millie thinks..
”Excerpt”
“What’s going on here?” I called out, and Vanderbilt turned to stare at me, his face pale in the light of the two naked bulbs hanging from the hallway ceiling. His mouth opened, but no sound came out, and he pressed a fist against it as if he might be sick.
He turned away again, doubling over and retching. And then I saw the bright shape under the silvery moonlight, motionless on the damp gray cobblestones.
My footsteps slowed. The night enveloped me like a giant clammy fist. A cacophony of champagne pops, happy shouts, and jazz rose up to meet midnight in the crowded streets all around us, but here in this sheltered courtyard, no one acknowledged the time. The air smelled sharply of vomit, thanks to Vanderbilt, and something else underneath it I couldn’t place and didn’t want to name.
I knew this courtyard at night. It was the place where rats skittered when I dumped the mop water or took out trash to the burn barrel. It was the place I trudged through to get home after closing, when my feet were tired and my eyes barely open. The place we were supposed to escape through if Prohibition agents or cops came through the front.
Beyond the slanted rectangle of yellow light from the open door, just past the dark shadow of the balcony above, Fitzroy and Rockefeller crouched over the shape on the ground, two black hulks in their dark suits. Rockefeller was touching the shape gently and murmuring something.
It was a person. A body.
“Who . . . ?” I said, my voice catching in my throat, coming out small.
No one heard me except Frank, who touched my arm as if to stop me moving forward, stop me getting involved, make me let him go first. None of which I was going to do.
“Who is she?” I said, louder. The body, it was obvious now that my eyes were adjusting to the dark, was a woman’s. A girl’s. Her beaded gold dress and brilliant hair spread out across the cobblestones beside the dry fountain like a shining puddle. A beaded handbag lay a few feet away.
No one answered me. I looked to my right at the two girls, clinging to each other and crying, both studiously not looking at the body.
I didn’t want to look either. At least I didn’t think I wanted to look, knew Ishouldn’t want to look, but my eyes were drawn back to it. My feet carried me closer.
Rockefeller picked up her hand, white and luminous in a ray of moonlight, and felt for a pulse in her wrist.
“Is she . . . all right?” I said, feeling a fool even as I said it. There was no way she was all right.
“She’s dead!” wailed one of the girls. “Her eyes! Just look at her eyes!”
They were open, staring upward as if into the shadowed face of the dark-haired boy hovering over her. Her head lay at a strange angle against the foot of the fountain. A fine mist beaded and glistened on her pale brow, her beautifully rounded cheekbones, her pink lips, her bright hair.
It was Arimentha. The girl who’d known Marion. The girl who’d wronged him terribly once, somehow, by her own admission.
But whatever she’d done, she hadn’t deserved this. To die here on the cold ground, her body left to grow damp with mist and mop water while seventeen versions of “Auld Lang Syne”played around her and the whole Quarter celebrated.
No one deserved this.
My eyes pricked with tears I wasn’t expecting. Why should I cry for this girl? Why should I feel bile in the back of my own throat at the sight of her blank eyes, her wasted life? “Do you know what happened to her?” Frank asked, looking around at the rich kids. “Did you see anything?”
They shook their heads, their eyes wide and staring.
“I think . . .” Rockefeller spoke up, his voice choked. “I think she fell off the balcony.”
“Or someone pushed her,” one of the girls whimpered, the brunette who until recently had been screaming continuously.
“What was she doing up there?” the other girl said. She was almost my height with auburn hair, though everything was washed strange and blue in the moonlight. “Look there in her hand—what’s that?”
A folded paper lay in Arimentha’s softly curled hand. In two strides, I’d reached her and plucked the paper up into my own hand.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Rockefeller said, straightening out of his crouch. “The police will want the crime scene to stay as it is.”
“If it’s a crime at all,” I said. “Like you said, she could’vefallen.”
Whether this was a murder or an accident, it had happened at Aunt Cal’s club—my club tonight—and I would decide what we did about it.
I held the paper up to the moonlight and saw it was a playbill for a circus that had already left town the week before. We had a stack of them still sitting on the end of the bar.
“What is it?” Fitzroy said, standing, too.
I ignored him and unfolded the paper. There was writing inside, a brief penciled letter, in a hand that looked like it would’ve been pretty if it wasn’t scrawled in such a hurry. I didn’t have the light or patience to interpret all the words, but I didn’t have to.
Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he’s one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after.
When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix’s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn’t count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi–love triangle….
But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself.
”Excerpt”
We push open the apartment building’s glass door, out into the yellow sunshine that’s a little too cheerful and bright. It’s hot as hell—the kind of heat that sticks to your skin, your hair, your freaking eyeballs.
“Christ, why did we sign up for this again?” Ezra says, his voice hoarse. “It’s so freaking early. I could still be asleep.”
“I mean, eleven isn’t technically early. It’s—you know—about halfway through the day.”
Ezra lights a blunt he pulls out of I-don’t-know-where and offers it to me, and we suck on the last of it as we walk. Reggaeton blasts from a nearby park’s cookout. The smell of smoke and burning meat wafts over, along with the laughter and screams of kids. We cross the street, pausing when a man on a bike zooms by with a boom box blasting Biggie, and we walk down the mold-slick stairs of the Bedford-Nostrand G stop, sliding our cards through the turnstile just as a train rumbles up to the platform.
The train doors slide shut behind us. It’s one of the older trains with splotches of black gum plastered to the floor and messages written in Sharpie on the windows. R + J = 4EVA.
My first instinct is to roll my eyes, but if I’m honest with myself, I can feel jealousy sprouting in my chest. What does it feel like, to love someone so much that you’re willing to publicly bare your heart and soul with a black Sharpie? What is it like to even love someone at all? My name is Felix Love, but I’ve never actually been in love. I don’t know. The irony actually kind of fucks with my head sometimes.
We grab a couple of orange seats and Ezra wipes a hand over his face as he yawns, leaning against my shoulder. It was my birthday last week, and we got into the habit of staying up until three in the morning and lying around all day. I’m seventeen now, and I can confirm that there isn’t much of a difference between sixteen and seventeen. Seventeen is just one of those in-between years, easily forgotten, like a Tuesday—stuck in between sweet sixteen and legal eighteen.
An older man dozes across from us. A woman stands with her baby stroller that’s filled with grocery bags. A hipster with a huge red beard holds his bicycle steady. The AC is blasting. Ezra sees me clutching myself against the ice-cold air, so he puts an arm over my shoulders. He’s my best friend—only friend, since I started at St. Catherine’s three years ago. We’re not together like that, not in any way, shape, or form, but everyone else always gets the wrong idea. The older man suddenly wakes up like he could smell the gay, and he doesn’t stop staring at us, even after I stare right back at him. The hipster gives us a reassuring smile. Two gay guys cuddling in the heart of Brooklyn shouldn’t feel this revolutionary, but suddenly, it does.
Maybe it’s the weed, or maybe it’s the fact that I’m that much closer to being an adult, but I suddenly feel a little reckless. I whisper to Ez, “Wanna give this guy a show?”
I nod in the direction of the older man who has straight-up refused to look away. Ezra smirks and rubs his hand up and down my arm, and I snuggle closer to him, and rest my head on his shoulder, and then Ez goes from zero to one hundred as he buries his face into my neck, which—okay—I’ve never actually gotten a whole lot of action before (i.e.: I’ve never even been kissed), and just feeling his mouth there kind of drives me crazy. I let out an embarrassing squeak-gasp, and Ezra puffs out a muffled laugh against the same damn spot.
I look up to see our audience staring, wide-eyed, totally scandalized. I wiggle my fingers at the man in a sarcastic half wave, but he must take this as an invitation to speak. “You know,” he goes, with a slight accent, “I have a grandson who’s gay.”
Ezra and I glance at each other with raised eyebrows.
“Um. Okay,” I say.
The man nods. “Yes, yes—I never knew, and then one day he sat me down, and my wife Betsy, before she passed, and then he was crying, and he told us: I’m gay. He’d already known for years, but he didn’t say anything because he was so afraid of what we would think. I can’t blame him for being afraid. The stories you hear. And his own father . . . Heartbreaking. You’d think a parent would always love their child, no matter what.” He pauses in his monologue, looking around as the train begins to slow down. “Anyway. This is my stop.”
He stands as the doors open. “You would like my grandson, I think. You two seem like very nice, gay boys.”
And with that, the man is lost to the platform as the woman with the baby stroller follows him out.
Ezra and I look at each other, and I burst out laughing. He shakes his head. “New York, man,” he says. “Seriously. Only in New York.”
We get off at Lorimer/Metropolitan and walk down and then back up a bunch of stairs to get to the L train. It’s June 1—the first day of Pride month in the city—so there are No Bigotry Allowed rainbow-colored signs plastered on the tiled walls. The platform is filled with pink-skinned Williamsburg hipsters, and the train takes forever to come.
“Shit. We’re going to be late,” Ezra says.
“Yeah. Well.”
“Declan’s going to be pissed.”
I don’t really care, to be honest. Declan’s a dick. “Not like we can do anything about it, right?”
By the time the train arrives, everyone’s fighting to get on, and we’re all packed together, me crushed against Ezra, the smell of beer and BO slicking the air. The subway rattles and shakes, almost throwing us off our feet—until, finally, we make it to Union Square.
It’s a typical crowded afternoon in the city. The sheer amount of people—that’s what I hate most about any part of Manhattan. At least in Brooklyn, you can walk down the street without being bumped into by twenty different shoulders and handbags. At least in Brooklyn, you don’t have to worry if you’re literally invisible because of your brown skin. Sometimes I try to find a white person to walk behind, just so that when everyone jumps out of that person’s way, they won’t knock into me.
Ezra and I inch our way through the crowd and past the farmers’ market, the smell of fish following us. We’re dressed pretty much the way we always are: even though it’s summer, Ezra wears a black T-shirt, sleeves rolled up to his shoulders to show off his Klimt tattoo of Judith I and the Head of Holofernes. He has on tight black jeans that’re cut off a few inches too high above his ankles, stained white Converses, and long socks with portraits of Andy Warhol. He has a gold septum piercing, and his thick black hair is tied up in a bun, sides shaved. Basically, peak hipster.
Whenever I’m around Ezra, eyes usually skip right over me to stare at him. I’m just an average hipster: curly hair, loose gray tank that shows my dark scars on my chest, darker than the rest of my golden-brown skin, a pair of denim shorts, smaller random tattoos that I’d gotten for twenty dollars down at Astor Place—my dad flipped out the first time, but he’s gotten used to them now—and worn-out sneakers that I’ve written and drawn all over with a Sharpie. Ezra thinks I’ve ruined them. He has a thing for keeping the purity of the designer’s intent.
We walk through the crowds of people who idle in front of the farmers’ market stalls selling jars of jam and freshly baked bread and flowers with bursts of color, men in business suits shoving past, dogs on leashes and toddlers on three-wheeled scooters threatening to trip us. We make it out of the farmers’ market, up the path that cuts through the green lawn, a few couples laid out on blankets. Some kids show off on their skateboards. Girls in summer dresses and shades lounge on benches with books that they aren’t really reading.
“Why’d we decide to do this summer program again?” Ezra says.
“For our college applications.”
“I already told you. I’m not going to college.”
“Oh. Then, yeah, I have no idea why you’re doing this.”
He smirks at me. We both know he’s probably just going to live off his trust fund when he graduates. Ezra is part Black, part Bengali, and his parents are filthy rich. So rich that they bought Ezra an apartment just so that he can live in Bed-Stuy for the summer while he’s in the arts program. (And these days, apartments like Ezra’s are just about a million dollars.) The Patels are the stereotypical Manhattan elite: endless champagne, fund-raisers, gala balls, and zero time for their own son, who was raised by three different nannies. It’s fucked-up, but I have to admit that I’m jealous. Ezra’s got his entire life laid out for him on a golden platter, while I’m going to have to claw and scrape and battle for what I want.
My dream has always been to go to Brown University, but my grades aren’t exactly stellar, my test scores are less than average, and their acceptance rate is 9 percent. It isn’t that I haven’t tried. I studied my ass off for the tests, and I write down every word my teachers say in class to stop my mind from wandering. Like my dad’s said, my brain is just wired differently.
The fact that I almost certainly won’t get into Brown sometimes makes me feel like there’s no point in even trying. But people have gotten in despite shitty test scores before, and even if my grades suck, my art doesn’t. I’m talented. I know that I am. The portfolio counts even more for students applying to focus on art, and since the St. Catherine’s summer program offers extra credit, there’s a chance I could raise my grades up from Cs and Bs. I might still have a shot of getting in.
Leah, Marisol, and Declan are already on the Union Square steps for the fashion shoot. St. Cat’s is on a different schedule from most NYC schools, and the summer program officially began a few days ago. St. Catherine’s likes to kick off the summer program with projects so that we can get to know the students from other classes. Ezra and I signed up for a fashion shoot, using some of his designs. Leah, with her bushy red hair and super-pale skin and curves and tank top and slightly revealing booty shorts, has her camera, ready to take photos. And, of course, Marisol is the model. She’s just as tall as Ezra, olive skin and thick brown hair and Cara Delevingne eyebrows. Just seeing her makes my nerves pump through my chest. Her hair’s a giant nest, she has green feathers glued to her eyelashes to match her lipstick. She wears the fourth dress in the lineup we’d planned: a sequin-portrait of Rihanna.
Declan Keane is running this whole thing as the director, which really just annoys the crap out of me. He doesn’t have any experience as a director whatsoever, but somehow, he always manages to weasel his way into everything. It doesn’t help that Declan acts like it’s his only mission in life to treat me and Ezra like shit. He talks crap about us every chance that he gets. He hates us, and he’s on a crusade to make everyone else hate us, too.
Declan’s busy talking to Marisol when he sees us coming. His eyes flash. He clenches his jaw.
“So nice to see you,” he calls out to us as we walk over, loud enough that a few people lounging on the steps turn their heads. “Ezra, thanks so much for coming.”
Ezra mutters beside me, “Told you he’d be pissed.”
Set on a remote island off the Irish coast, this is one guest list no one would want to be on, just as no one would have wanted an invitation to the New Year’s Eve party in Foley’s previous novel, The Hunting Party . Lives unravel amid the revelry on an eerie and remote island as family and friends assemble for a glam wedding in an updated Murder on the Orient Express. Each of the principal characters has a reason to want one of their number dead, there are old secrets, and one of them is murdered.
”Excerpt”
The Wedding Night
The lights go out.
In an instant, everything is in darkness. The band stop their playing. Inside the marquee the wedding guests squeal and clutch at one another. The light from the candles on the tables only adds to the confusion, sends shadows racing up the canvas walls. It’s impossible to see where anyone is or hear what anyone is saying: above the guests’ voices the wind rises in a frenzy.
Outside a storm is raging. It shrieks around them, it batters the marquee. At each assault the whole structure seems to flex and shudder with a loud groaning of metal; the guests cower in alarm. The doors have come free from their ties and flap at the entrance. The flames of the paraffin torches that illuminate the doorway snicker.
It feels personal, this storm. It feels as though it has saved all its fury for them.
This isn’t the first time the electrics have shorted. But last time the lights snapped back on again within minutes. The guests returned to their dancing, their drinking, their pill-popping, their screwing, their eating, their laughing . . . and forgot it ever happened.
How long has it been now? In the dark it’s difficult to tell. A few minutes? Fifteen? Twenty?
They’re beginning to feel afraid. This darkness feels somehow ominous, intent. As though anything could be happening beneath its cover.
Finally, the bulbs flicker back on. Whoops and cheers from the guests. They’re embarrassed now about how the lights find them: crouched as though ready to fend off an attack. They laugh it off. They almost manage to convince themselves that they weren’t frightened.
The scene illuminated in the marquee’s three adjoining tents should be one of celebration, but it looks more likeone of devastation. In the main dining section, clots of wine spatter the laminate floor, a crimson stain spreads across white linen. Bottles of champagne cluster on every surface, testament to an evening of toasts and celebrations. A forlorn pair of silver sandals peeks from beneath a tablecloth.
The Irish band begin to play again in the dance tent – a rousing ditty to restore the spirit of celebration. Many of the guests hurry in that direction, eager for some light relief. If you were to look closely at where they step you might see the marks where one barefoot guest has trodden in broken glass and left bloody footprints across the laminate, drying to a rusty stain. No one notices.
Other guests drift and gather in the corners of the main tent, nebulous as leftover cigarette smoke. Loath to stay, but also loath to step outside the sanctuary of the marquee while the storm still rages. And no one can leave the island. Not yet. The boats can’t come until the wind dies down. In the centre of everything stands the huge cake. It has appeared whole and perfect before them for most of the day, its train of sugar foliage glittering beneath the lights. But only minutes before the lights went out the guests gathered around to watch its ceremonial disembowelling.
Now the deep red sponge gapes from within.
Then from outside comes a new sound. You might almost mistake it for the wind. But it rises in pitch and volume until it is unmistakable.
The guests freeze. They stare at one another. They are suddenly afraid again. More so than they were when the lights went out. They all know what they are hearing. It is a scream of terror.
Cadence Archer arrives on Harvard’s campus desperate to understand why her brother, Eric, a genius who developed paranoid schizophrenia took his own life there the year before. Losing Eric has left a black hole in Cady’s life, and while her decision to follow in her brother’s footsteps threatens to break her family apart, she is haunted by questions of what she might have missed. And there’s only one place to find answers.
As Cady struggles under the enormous pressure at Harvard, she investigates her brother’s final year, armed only with a blue notebook of Eric’s cryptic scribblings. She knew he had been struggling with paranoia, delusions, and illusory enemies—but what tipped him over the edge? With her suspicions mounting, Cady herself begins to hear voices, seemingly belonging to three ghosts who walked the university’s hallowed halls—or huddled in its slave quarters. Among them is a person whose name has been buried for centuries, and another whose name mankind will never forget.
Does she share Eric’s illness, or is she tapping into something else? Cady doesn’t know how or why these ghosts are contacting her, but as she is drawn deeper into their worlds, she believes they’re moving her closer to the truth about Eric, even as keeping them secret isolates her further. Will listening to these voices lead her to the one voice she craves—her brother’s—or will she follow them down a path to her own destruction?
”Excerpt”
Cady hadn’t set foot on Harvard’s campus since her older brother’s suicide. It was the place where Eric had eaten his last meal, dreamed his last dream, taken his last breath. The sight of the red brick dormitories, a picture postcard of collegiate perfection to so many, made her heart pound. For her, it wasn’t a college, it was a haunted house.
And today she was moving in.
Cady couldn’t let her doubts show as they drove into Harvard Yard. The sun-dappled quadrangle and its ancient elms were festooned with red balloons and a big crimson banner reading welcome harvard mmxxiii. She reminded herself that she’d wanted this, insisted on it, sworn that she could handle it, bet everything on it. Yet her knee bounced in the backseat as her father parked right outside her freshman dormitory, Weld Hall. She spied his face in the rearview mirror, his eyes weary, his jowls gray and unshaven. His sister, Cady’s aunt Laura, sat in the front passenger seat. Cady’s mother remained home in Pennsylvania, too angry at her daughter to come today. Maybe that was for the best; seeing her mother’s face would’ve made Cady lose her nerve.
“Look at this parking spot, I told you I was good for something,” Aunt Laura said with a wink. A car accident in her twenties had left her paraplegic and she used a wheelchair, hence the parking privileges, although Cady never thought of her as handicapped. Laura possessed an irrepressibly positive outlook, a trait to be tested today. She had come ostensibly to lend the use of her giant van, but Cady knew it was to fill in for her mother, and she was grateful.
Her father yanked up the emergency brake and took a heavy breath. “Ready?”
Cady got out and helped Laura into her wheelchair as her father went around to the back of the van, their solemn mood at odds with everyone around them. On the front steps of her new dorm, she noticed a boy posing for a photograph with six smiling relatives. A blond girl standing in the bed of a pickup laughed as she pushed a boxed futon toward her father, who waited on the ground wearing a Harvard T-shirt with his cowboy boots and Stetson. A tall boy in a Lakers jersey wiped his mother’s happy tears from her cheeks.
Cady envied them. They didn’t have to fake it.
She joined her father at the rear of the van and saw him hauling out her green duffel bag. “Oh, I’ll take that one,” she said, she hoped not too eagerly.
“I got it, you get the roller suitcase.”
“No, Dad, seriously.” Cady grabbed hold of the nylon straps and he looked at her, puzzled. Then she deployed the head tilt and tone her mother had perfected. “Your back.”
He held tight for a moment before he relented and let her have it. “All right, but only because I haven’t been doing my exercises.”
“When did my little bro get so old?” Laura teased. “You know, some people say back pain can be psychological.”
“Then I blame you two,” he said.
Cady’s dorm room was Weld 23, only the second floor—only, she caught herself—she couldn’t help but think of the height. The elevator was crowded, so her father decided to wait, but people made room for Aunt Laura to wheel on and Cady to squeeze in after her, hugging the duffel close to her chest. Laura held a laundry hamper filled with linens on her lap.
“Nice that they have an elevator,” she said to Cady. It was her official duty to point out every good thing that day.
A middle-aged man overheard. “You know what was in this space before it was an elevator? JFK’s freshman dorm room. He went from Weld to the White House.” He slapped the back of his reed-thin son. “Might have the next president right here! Right, Max?”
His son’s face reddened, and Cady’s heart went out to him.
The elevator doors pinged open. Cady and Laura exited, and Laura broke into a grin. “God, can you imagine being here with a young JFK living down the hall? He must have been dreamy. He was probably a horn-dog even then, though.”
The first image Cady could conjure of JFK was the last moment of his life, the grainy footage of him waving from that car. She tried to imagine him as a young man her age, full of the nerves and excitement she saw on every face around her. If someone had told him he would be president, would he have blushed like that boy in the elevator, or would he have owned it? Did he sense he was bound for greatness? If someone had told him he would be assassinated, would he still have wanted that future?
“Although,” Laura continued, “if you were looking for sexy Kennedy ghosts, you should’ve gone to Brown. That’s where John-John went. He was the best-looking of them all. I had such a crush on him.”
Oh, right, Cady remembered, his son, too. And his brother. And his other brother sort of killed that gir—maybe that was what started it. A lot of ghosts in that cursed family. So far only one ghost in the Archers. Were they cursed, too?
A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.
Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.
They’re polar opposites.
In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.
Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.
”Excerpt”
When I jerked awake, the room was dark, and there was music blasting through it.
I stood and ambled, dazed and gin-fogged, toward the knife block in the kitchen. I hadn’t heard of a serial killer who began each murder by rousing the victim with R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” but I really couldn’t rule the possibility out.
As I moved toward the kitchen, the music dimmed, and I realized it was coming from the other side of the house. From the Grump’s house.
I looked toward the glowing numbers on the stove. Twelve thirty at night, and my neighbor was blasting a song most often heard in dated dramedies wherein the protagonist walks home alone, hunched against the rain.
I stormed toward the window and thrust my upper body through it. The Grump’s windows were open too, and I could see a swath of bodies lit up in the kitchen, holding glasses and mugs and bottles, leaning lazy heads on shoulders, looping arms around necks as the whole group sang along with fervor.
It was a raging party. So apparently the Grump didn’t hate all people, just me. I cupped my mouth around my hands and yelled out the window, “EXCUSE ME!”
I tried twice more with no response then slammed the window closed and circled the first floor, snapping the others shut. When I was finished, it still sounded pretty much like R.E.M. was playing a concert on my coffee table.
And then, for a beautiful moment, the song stopped and the sounds of the party, laughter and chatter and bottles clinking, dipped to a static murmur.
And then it started again.
The same song. Even louder. Oh God. As I pulled my sweatpants back on, I contemplated the advantages of calling the police with a noise complaint. On the one hand, I might maintain plausible deniability with my neighbor. (Oh, ’twas not I who called the constable! I am but a young woman of nine and twenty, not a crotchety old spinster who loathes laughter, fun, song, and dance!) On the other, ever since I lost my dad, I’d had a harder and harder time forgiving small offenses.
I threw on my pizza-print sweatshirt and stormed out the front door, marching up the neighbor’s steps. Before I could second-guess myself, I’d reached for the doorbell.
It rang out in the same powerful baritone as a grandfather clock, cutting through the music, but the singing didn’t stop. I counted to ten, then rang it again. Inside, the voices didn’t even waver. If the partygoers heard the doorbell, they were ignoring it.
I pounded on the door for a few more seconds before accepting no one was coming, then turned to stomp home. One o’ clock, I decided. I’d give them until one before I called the cops.
The music was even louder in the house than I remembered, and in the few minutes since I’d shut the windows, the temperature had risen to a sticky swelter. With nothing better to do, I grabbed a paperback from my bag and headed for the deck, fumbling for the light switches inside the sliding door.
My fingers hit them but nothing happened. The bulbs outside were dead. Reading by phone light, at one in the morning, on the deck of my father’s second home it was! I stepped out, skin tingling from the refreshing chill of the breeze coming off the water.
The Grump’s deck was dark too, except for a lone fluorescent bulb surrounded by clumsy moths, which was why I nearly screamed when something moved in the shadows.
And by nearly screamed, I of course mean definitely screamed.
“Jesus!” The shadowy thing gasped and shot up from the chair where it had been sitting. And by shadowy thing, I of course mean man who’d been chilling in the dark until I scared the shit out of him. “What, what?” he demanded, like he expected me to announce that he was covered in scorpions.
If he had been, this would be less awkward.
“Nothing!” I said, still breathing hard from the surprise. “I didn’t see you there!”
“You didn’t see me here?” he repeated. He gave a scratchy, disbelieving laugh. “Really? You didn’t see me, on my own deck?”
Technically, I didn’t see him now either. The porch light was a few feet behind and above him, transforming him into nothing but a tallish, person-shaped silhouette with a halo ringing his dark, messy hair. At this point, it would probably be better if I managed to go the whole summer without having to make eye contact with him anyway.
“Do you also scream when cars drive past on the highway or you spot people through restaurant windows? Would you mind blacking out all our perfectly aligned windows so you don’t accidentally see me when I’m holding a knife or a razor?”
I crossed my arms viciously over my chest. Or tried to. The gin was still making me a little fuzzy and clumsy.
What I meant to say—what the old January would’ve said—was Could you possibly turn your music down a little bit? Actually, she probably would’ve just slathered herself in glitter, put on her favorite velvet loafers, and shown up at the front door with a bottle of champagne, determined to win the Grump over.
But so far, this was the third worst day of my life, and that January was probably buried wherever they put the old Taylor Swift, so what I actually said was “Could you turn off your sad-boy angsting soundtrack?”
The silhouette laughed and leaned against his deck railing, his beer bottle dangling from one hand. “Does it look like I’m the one running the playlist?”
“No, it looks like you’re the one sitting in the dark alone at his own party,” I said, “but when I rang the doorbell to ask your frat brothers to turn down the volume, they couldn’t hear me over the Jell-O wrestling, so I’m asking you.”
He studied me through the dark for a minute—or at least, I assumed that was what he was doing, since neither of us could actually see the other.
Finally, he said, “Look, no one will be more thrilled than me when this night ends and everyone gets out of my house, but it is a Saturday night. In summer, on a street full of vacation homes. Unless this neighborhood got airlifted to the little town from Footloose, it doesn’t seem crazy to play music this late. And maybe—just maybe—the brand-new neighbor who stood on her deck screaming foot job so loud birds scattered could afford to be lenient if one miserable party goes later than she’d like.”
Six years after the fight that ended their friendship, Daphne Berg is shocked when Drue Cavanaugh walks back into her life, looking as lovely and successful as ever, with a massive favor to ask. Daphne hasn’t spoken one word to Drue in all this time—she doesn’t even hate-follow her ex-best friend on social media—so when Drue asks if she will be her maid-of-honor at the society wedding of the summer, Daphne is rightfully speechless.
Drue was always the one who had everything—except the ability to hold onto friends. Meanwhile, Daphne’s no longer the same self-effacing sidekick she was back in high school. She’s built a life that she loves, including a growing career as a plus-size Instagram influencer. Letting glamorous, seductive Drue back into her life is risky, but it comes with an invitation to spend a weekend in a waterfront Cape Cod mansion. When Drue begs and pleads and dangles the prospect of cute single guys, Daphne finds herself powerless as ever to resist her friend’s siren song.
”Excerpt”
2018
“OhmyGod, I am so sorry. Am I late?” Leela Thakoon hurried into the coffee shop with a cross-body bag hanging high on one hip, a zippered garment bag draped over her right arm, and an apologetic look on her face. With her silvery-lavender hair in a high ponytail, her round face and petite figure, and her emphatic red lipstick, she looked exactly the way she did on her Instagram, only a little bit older and a little bit more tired, which was true of every mortal, I supposed, who had to move through the world without the benefit of filters.
“You weren’t late. I was early,” I said, and shook her hand. For me, there was nothing worse than showing up for a meeting feeling flustered and hot and out of breath. In addition to the physical discomfort, there was the knowledge that I was confirming everyone’s worst suspicions about fat ladies—lazy, couch potatoes, can’t climb a flight of stairs without getting winded.
Today I had wanted to look my best, so I’d worked out at six in the morning and cooled down for an hour, unhappy experience having taught me that, for every hour I exercised, I’d need thirty minutes to stop sweating. I’d arrived at the coffee shop Leela had chosen twenty minutes ahead of time, so that I could scope out the venue, choose an advantageous seat, and attempt to best project an aura of cool, collected competence—#freelancehustle, I thought. But if I landed this collaboration, it would mean that the money I earned as an influencer would be more than the money I made doing my regular twenty-hour-a-week babysitting gig, and possibly even more than my dog’s account was bringing in. I wouldn’t be supporting myself with my online work, but I’d be closer to that goal. In yoga that morning, when we’d set our intention, I’d thought, Please. Please let this happen. Please let this work out.
“Want something to drink?” I asked. I already had my preferred summer beverage, cold brew with a splash of cream and extra ice, sitting in front of me.
“No, I’m fine,” said Leela, pulling the metal water bottle of the environmentally aware out of her bag, uncapping it, and taking a swig. Oh, well, I thought. At least my coffee had come in a glass and not plastic. “I’m so glad to meet you.” Leela draped the garment bag over a chair, smoothed her already smooth hair, and took a seat, crossing her legs and smiling at me brightly. She was wearing a pair of loose-fitting khaki shorts, pulled up high and belted tight around her tiny waist, and a blousy white top with dolman sleeves that left her slender arms bare. Her golden skin, a deeper gold than I got even at my most tan, glowed from the sunshine she’d probably enjoyed on a getaway to Tahiti or Oahu. There was a jaunty red scarf around her neck, pinned with a large jeweled brooch. She looked like a tiny androgynous elf, or as if someone had waved a wand and said, Boy Scout, but make it tiny and cute and fashion. I was sure that some piece of her outfit had been purchased at a thrift shop I’d never find, and that another had been sourced from a website I’d never discover, or made by some designer I’d never heard of, in sizes that would never fit me, and that it had cost more than one month of my rent. The entire rent, not just the half I paid.
Leela uncapped her bottle and looked me over, taking her time. I sipped my coffee and tried not to squirm, breathing through the insecurity I could feel whenever I was confronted by someone as stylish and cute as Leela Thakoon. I’d worn one of my favorite summer outfits, a hip-length pale yellow linen tunic over a plain white short-sleeved T-shirt, cropped olive-green leggings with buttons at the cuffs, and tan platform sandals, accessorized with a long plastic tortoiseshell necklace, big gold hoop earrings, and oversized sunglasses. My hair—regular brown—was piled on top of my head in a bun that I hoped looked effortless and had actually required twenty minutes and three different styling products to achieve. I’d kept my makeup simple, just tinted moisturizer to smooth out my olive complexion, mascara, and shimmery pink lip gloss, a look that said I care, but not too much. In my previous life, I’d dressed to hide, in a palette limited to black, with the occasional daring venture into navy blue. These days, I wore colors and clothes that weren’t bulky or boxy, that showed off my shape and made me feel good. Every morning, I photographed and posted my outfit of the day (OOTD), tagging the designers or the places I’d shopped for my Instagram page and my blog, which I’d named Big Time. I kept my hair and makeup on point for the pictures, especially if I was wearing clothes I’d been gifted or, better yet, paid to wear. That had entailed a certain outlay of cash, on cuts and color and blowouts, in addition to a lot of trips to Sephora and many hours watching YouTube makeup tutorials before I’d found a routine that I could execute on my own. It had been an investment; one that I hoped would pay off.
So far, the signs were good. “Oh my God, look at you,” Leela said, clapping her hands together in delight. Her nails were unpainted, clipped into short ovals. A few of them were ragged and looked bitten at the tips. “You’re adorbs!”
I smiled back—it would have been impossible not to—and wondered if she meant it. In my experience, which was limited but growing, fashion people tended to be dramatic and effusive, full of hyperbolic praise that was not always entirely sincere.
“So what can I tell you about the line?” she asked, removing a Moleskine notebook, a fountain pen, and a small glass bottle of ink from her bag and setting them down beside her water bottle. I tried not to stare. I did have questions about the clothes, and the collaboration, but what I really wanted to know was more about Leela. I knew she was about my age, and that she’d done a little modeling, a little acting, and that she’d made a few idle-rich-kid friends and started styling their looks. The friends had introduced her to celebrities, and Leela had started to style them. In a few years’ time, she had amassed over a hundred thousand social-media friends and fans who followed her feed to see pictures of beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes in beautiful spots all over the world. By the time she’d announced her clothing line, Leela had a built-in audience of potential customers, people who’d seen her clients lounging on the prow of a yacht in the crocheted bikini Leela had sourced from a beach vendor she’d discovered in Brazil, or walking the red carpet in a one-of-a-kind custom hand-beaded gown, or dressed down in breathable linen, handing out picture books to smiling children in poor villages all over the world.
When Leela had launched the brand she was calling Leef, she’d made a point of saying that her collection would be “size-inclusive.” She didn’t just want to sell clothes to straight-size women, then toss big girls a bone in the form of a belated capsule collection or, worse, ignore us completely. Even better, in the videos I’d watched and the press release I’d read on her website, Leela had sounded sincere when she’d said, “It’s not fair for designers to relegate an entire group of women to shoes, handbags, and scarves because the powers that be decided they were too big or too small to wear the clothes.” Amen, sister, I’d thought. “My clothes are for every woman. For all of us.” Which sounded good, but was also, I knew, a bit of a cliché. These days, designers who’d rather die than gain ten pounds, designers who’d rather make clothes for purse dogs than fat people, could mouth the right platitudes and make the right gestures. I would have to see for myself if Leela was sincere.
“Tell me what got you interested in fashion,” I asked.
“Well, it took a minute,” Leela said, smiling her charming smile. “I’ve always been drawn to… I guess you’d call it self-expression. If I were a better writer, I’d write. If I were a better artist, I’d paint or sculpt. And, of course, my parents are still devastated that I’m not in med school.” I saw a fleeting expression of sorrow, or anger, or something besides arch amusement flit across her pretty features, but it was gone before I could name it, erased by another smile. “High school was kind of a shit show. You know, the mean girls. It took me a while to pull it together, but I made it out alive. And I figured out that I know how to put clothes together. I know how to take a ten-dollar T-shirt and wear it with a two-thousand-dollar skirt and have it look like an intentional whole.” I nodded along, like I, too, had a closet full of two-thousand-dollar skirts and other components of intentional wholes. “So I found my way to working as a stylist. And what I found,” she said, lifting her shoulders and straightening in her seat, “is that women still don’t have the options that we should.” She raised one finger, covered from knuckle to knuckle with gold rings that were as fine as pieces of thread. “If you’re not in the straight-size range, there’s nothing that fits.” Additional fingers went up. “If you’ve got limited mobility, you can’t always find clothes without hooks and buttons and zippers. If you’re young, or on a budget, if you want clothes that are ethically produced, and are made by people who are paid a living wage, I don’t want women to ever have to compromise,” she said, eyes wide, her expression earnest. “You shouldn’t have to decide between looking cute and buying your clothes from a sweatshop.”
I found myself nodding along, feeling a pang of regret for every fast-fashion item I’d ever picked up at Old Navy or H&M.
I didn’t mean to star in a sex tape, okay?
It was just one of those unexplainable things. Like Stonehenge, Police Academy 2, and morning glory clouds.
It just happened.
Now my ball-busting father is sentencing me to six months of celibacy, sobriety, and morbid boredom under the roof of Boston’s nerdiest girl alive, Sailor Brennan.
The virginal archer is supposed to babysit my ass while I learn to take my place in Royal Pipelines, my family’s oil company.
Little does she know, that’s not the only pipe I’ll be laying…
Sailor
I didn’t want this gig, okay?
But the deal was too sweet to walk away from.
I needed the public endorsement; Hunter needed a nanny.
Besides, what’s six months in the grand scheme of things?
It’s not like I’m in danger of falling in love with the appallingly gorgeous, charismatic gazillionaire who happens to be one of Boston’s most eligible bachelors.
No. I will remain immune to Hunter Fitzpatrick’s charm.
Even at the cost of losing everything I have.
Even at the cost of burning down his kingdom.
Just after the Second World War, in the small English village of Chawton, an unusual but like-minded group of people band together to attempt something remarkable.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Chawton was the final home of Jane Austen, one of England’s finest novelists. Now it’s home to a few distant relatives and their diminishing estate. With the last bit of Austen’s legacy threatened, a group of disparate individuals come together to preserve both Jane Austen’s home and her legacy. These people—a laborer, a young widow, the local doctor, and a movie star, among others—could not be more different and yet they are united in their love for the works and words of Austen. As each of them endures their own quiet struggle with loss and trauma, some from the recent war, others from more distant tragedies, they rally together to create the Jane Austen Society.
”Excerpt”
Chawton, Hampshire
June 1932
He lay back on the low stone wall, knees pulled up, and stretched out his spine against the rock. The birdsong pierced the early-morning air in little shrieks that hammered at his very skull. Lying there, still, face turned flat upwards to the sky, he could feel death all around him in the small church graveyard. He must have looked like an effigy himself, resting on top of the wall, as if carved into permanent silence, abreast a silent tomb. He had never left his small village to see the great cathedrals of his country, but he knew from books how the sculpted ancient rulers lay just like this, atop their elevated shrines, for lower men like himself to gaze at centuries later in awe.
It was haying season, and he had left his wagon in the lane, right where it met the kissing gate and the farm fields at the end of old Gosport Road. Huge bundles of hay had already been piled up high on the back of the wagon, waiting for transport to the horse and dairy farms that dotted the outer vicinity of the village, stretching in a row from Alton to East Tisted. As he lay there, he could feel the back of his shirt, damp from sweat, even though the sun was pale and barely trying; at just nine in the morning he had already been hard at work in the fields for several hours.
The multitude of finches, robins, and tits suddenly quieted down as if on command, and he closed his eyes. His dog had been on guard until that moment, looking out over the mossy stone wall at the sheep that dotted the fields below, just past the hidden ha-ha that marked the perimeter of the estate. But as the farmer’s laboured breath became deep and rhythmic with sleep, the dog took his own cue and lay down beneath his master in the cool dirt of the graveyard.
“Excuse me.”
He jolted awake at the voice now resonant above him. A lady’s voice. An American voice.
Sitting up, he swung his legs down from the stone wall to stand before her. He looked at her face quickly, glanced at the rest of her, then just as quickly looked away.
She appeared to be quite young, no older than her early twenties. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat with an indigo-blue ribbon tied about it that matched the deep blue of her tailored dress. She looked quite tall, almost the same height as him, until he realized she was wearing the highest pair of heels he had ever seen. In one hand she held a small pamphlet, in the other a black clutch purse—and around her neck hung a tiny cross on a short silver chain.
“I’m so sorry to disturb you, but you’re the first person I’ve met all morning. And I’m quite lost, you see.”
As a lifelong resident of Chawton, population 377, the man was not surprised. He was always one of the first villagers up and about in the morning, right behind the milkman, Dr. Gray on his more pressing rounds, and the postman doing his pickup from the local office.
“You see,” she repeated, starting to adjust to his natural reticence, “I came down for the day from London—I took the train out here from Winchester to see the home of the writer Jane Austen. But I can’t find it, and I saw this little parish church from the road and decided to have a look around. To find some trace of her if I could.”
The man looked behind his right shoulder at the church, the same church he had attended all his life, made of local flint and red sandstone and sheltered by beech and elm trees. It had been rebuilt a few generations ago—nothing notable was left inside of Jane Austen or her immediate family.
He turned and looked back now over his left shoulder, at the small stile at the rear of the churchyard, through which one could just glimpse towering yew hedges clipped into circular cones. Even as a boy they had looked to him like nothing so much as extremely large salt and pepper cellars. The hedges ran along the south terrace garden of an imposing Elizabethan house set on an incline, with a gabled tiled roof, red brickwork, and a three-story Tudor porch covered in vines.
“The big house is back there,” he said abruptly, “just past the church. The Great House, it’s called. Where the Knight family lives. Miss Austen’s mother and sister’s graves are right here—do you see, miss, alongside the church wall?”
Her face lit up in gratitude, both for the information and for his slow warming to the conversation.
“Oh my goodness, I had no idea.…”
Then her eyes began to well up. She was the most striking human being he had ever met, like a model in a hair or soap advertisement in the papers. As the tears started, the colour of her eyes crystallized into something he had never before seen, a shade of blue almost like violet, while the tears caught on rows of inky-black lashes, blacker even than her hair.
Looking away, he tried to step around her carefully, his dog, Rider, now nipping about at his muddy boots. He walked over until he was standing next to the two large slabs of stone that stood upright in the ground. She followed him, the heels of her black pumps sticking a bit in the graveyard dirt, and he watched as she silently mouthed the words carved onto the twin tombstones.
Backing away, he fiddled about to find his cap from his pocket. Brushing back the lock of light blond hair that tended to fall across his brow as he worked, he tucked it up under the rim of the cap as he pulled it forward and down over his eyes. He wanted to be away from her now, from the strange emotion being stirred up in her by the unadorned graves of simple women dead these past one hundred years.
Off he wandered to wait with Rider by the main lych gate to the churchyard. After several minutes she finally appeared from around the corner of the church, this time stopping to read the inscription of every stone she passed, as if hoping to discover even more slumbering souls of note. Every so often she would teeter a bit as her heel caught the edge of a stone, and she would grimace just so slightly at her own clumsiness. But her eyes never left the graves below.
She stopped at the lych gate next to him and looked back with a contented sigh. She was smiling now and more composed—so composed that he finally picked up the whiff of money in both her poise and her manners.
“I’m so sorry about that, I just wasn’t prepared. You see, I came all this way to find the cottage, where she wrote the books—the little table, the creaking door,” she added, but to no visible reaction. “I couldn’t find out much about any of this while in London—thank you so much for telling me.”
He held the lych gate open for her and they started to walk back towards the main road together.
“I can take you to her house if you’d like—it’s barely a mile or so up the lane. I’ve done my morning haying for the farm, before it gets too hot, so I’ve time to spare.”
She smiled, a great big white winning smile, the kind of smile he could only imagine being American. “That is awfully kind of you, thank you. You know, I was assuming people came all the time, like this, like me—do they?”
He shrugged as he kept his pace slow to meet hers along the half-mile gravel drive that led down to the road from the Great House.
“Often enough, I guess. Nothing really much to see, though. It’s just workers’ flats now, at the cottage—tenants in all the rooms.”
He turned to see her face tighten in disappointment. As if to cheer her up, before he even knew what had come over him, he asked her about the books.
“I’m not even sure I can answer that,” she replied, as he pointed the way back down the country lane, opposite the end where his wagon sat with its load temporarily forgotten. “I just feel, when I read her, when I reread her—which I do, more than any other author—it’s as if she is inside my head. Like music. My father first read the books to me when I was very young—he died when I was twelve—and I hear his voice, too, when I read her. Nothing made him laugh out loud, nothing, the way those books did.”
He listened to her rambling on, then shook his head as if in disbelief.
“You haven’t read her then?” the woman asked, a disbelieving light in her own eyes meeting his.
“Can’t say I’ve too much interest. Stick to Haggard and the like. Adventure stories, you know. Suppose you might judge me for that.”
“I would never judge anyone for what they read.” She caught the ironic look on his face and added, with another broad smile, “Although I guess I just did.”
“All the same, I never understood how a bunch of books about girls looking for husbands could be on par with the great writers. Tolstoy and such.”
She looked at him with new interest. “You’ve read Tolstoy?”
“Used to—I was going to be sent up to study, during the war, but both my brothers got called to fight. I stayed back here, to help out.”
“Do you all work the farm together then?”
He looked away. “No, miss. They’re both dead now. The war.”
One day in the City of Lights. One night in search of lost time.
Paris between the wars teems with artists, writers, and musicians, a glittering crucible of genius. But amidst the dazzling creativity of the city’s most famous citizens, four regular people are each searching for something they’ve lost.
Camille was the maid of Marcel Proust, and she has a secret: when she was asked to burn her employer’s notebooks, she saved one for herself. Now she is desperate to find it before her betrayal is revealed. Souren, an Armenian refugee, performs puppet shows for children that are nothing like the fairy tales they expect. Lovesick artist Guillaume is down on his luck and running from a debt he cannot repay—but when Gertrude Stein walks into his studio, he wonders if this is the day everything could change. And Jean-Paul is a journalist who tells other people’s stories, because his own is too painful to tell. When the quartet’s paths finally cross in an unforgettable climax, each discovers if they will find what they are looking for.
”Excerpt”
The Armenian works by the light of a single candle. His tools lie in front of him on the table: a spool of cotton, a square of fabric, haberdasher’s scissors, a needle.
The flame flickers, and shadows leap across the walls of the tiny room, dancing ghosts. Souren Balakian folds the fabric in half, checks that the edges align exactly, and then he picks up the scissors. He feels the resistance beneath his fingers as the steel blades bite into the material. He always enjoys this momentary show of defiance before he gives the gentlest of squeezes, and the scissors cut through the doubled-up fabric. He eases the blades along familiar contours, working by eye alone. He has done this so many times, on so many nights, there is no need to measure a thing. Torso, arms, neckline—this last cut wide, to accommodate the outsized head.
When he has finished, there are two identical shapes on the table in front of him. He sweeps the unused scraps of cloth onto the floor, and picks up the needle and thread. After the sundering, reconstitution. Holding the two pieces of material in perfect alignment, he pushes the tip of the needle through both layers of fabric, and pulls the thread tight. He works with ferocious deliberation, as if it is his very life that he is stitching back together. He squints, careful to keep the stitches evenly spaced. When he is finished, he breaks the thread with a sharp twist of his fingers and holds the garment up in the half-light. A small grunt of satisfaction.
Night after night Souren sits at this bench and sews a new tunic. By the end of the day it will be gone, a cloud of gray ash blowing in the wind, and then he will sit down and create another.
He lays the completed costume on the work surface and stands up. He surveys the ranks of sightless eyes that stare unblinking into the room. Rows of hooks have been hammered into the wall. A wooden hand puppet hangs from every one. There are portly kings and beautiful princesses. There are brave men with dangerous eyes, and a haggard witch with warts on her ugly chin. There are cherubic children, their eyes too wide and innocent for this motley group. There is a wolf.
This ragtag crowd is Souren’s family now.
He unhooks a young boy called Hector and carries him to the table. He pulls the newly sewn tunic over Hector’s head. He turns the puppet toward him and examines his handiwork. Hector is a handsome fellow, with a button nose and rosy cheeks. The tunic fits him well. The puppet performs a small bow and waves at him.
“Ah, Hector,” whispers Souren sadly. “You are always so happy to see me, even when you know what is to come.” He looks up at the clock on the wall. It is a few hours past midnight. The new day has already begun.
Each evening Souren battles sleep for as long as he can. He works long into the night, applying fresh coats of paint to the puppets and sewing new clothes for them by candlelight. He stays at his workbench until his eyes are so heavy that he can no longer keep them open. But there is only so long he can fight the inevitable. His beloved puppets cannot protect him from the demons that pursue him through the darkest shadows of the night.
His dreams always come for him in the end.
––––
RAT-A-TAT-TAT.
Guillaume Blanc sits up in his bed, his heart smashing against his ribs, his breath quick, sharp, urgent. He stares at the door, waiting for the next angry tattoo.
The whispered words he heard through the door scream at him now: Three days.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
His shoulders slump. There is nobody knocking, not this time. The noise is coming from somewhere closer. Guillaume turns and squints through the window above the bed. The first blush of early morning sunlight smears the sky. From up here on the sixth floor, the rooftops of the city stretch out beneath him, a glinting cornucopia of slate and glass, a tapestry of cupolas and towers. There is the culprit: a woodpecker, richly plumed in blue and yellow, perched halfway up the window frame. It is staring beadily at the wood, as if trying to remember what it is supposed to do next.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
It is early, too early for anything good.
The shock of adrenaline subsides enough for Guillaume to register that his temples are pounding. He rolls over, spies a glass of cloudy water on the floor next to the bed, and drinks it thirstily. He rubs a dirty palm against his forehead. An ocean of pain to drown in. An empty wine bottle lies on its side in the middle of the small room. He stole it from the back of Madame Cuillasse’s kitchen cupboard when he staggered in last night. It was covered in dust and long forgotten, not even good enough for her coq au vin, but by then Guillaume was too drunk to care.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
It feels as if the woodpecker is perched on the tip of Guillaume’s nose and is jabbing its sharp little beak right between his eyes. It’s typical of his luck, he reflects. The bird has no business in the dirty, narrow streets of Montmartre. It should be flying free with its brothers and sisters in the Bois de Boulogne, hammering joyfully away at tree trunks, rather than attacking the window frame of Guillaume’s studio. And yet here it is.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
The woodpecker’s head is a ferocious blur, then perfectly still again. What goes through its head, Guillaume wonders, during those moments of contemplative silence? Is the woodpecker asking itself: who am I, really, if I am not pecking wood? Am I, God forbid, just a bird?
Three days.
Guillaume lets out a small moan. There are lightning bolts erupting behind his eyes. He casts his mind back to the previous night. He was wandering through Montmartre, anxiously trying to outpace his problems, when he had seen Emile Brataille sitting alone in the bar at the end of his street. Brataille is an art dealer who spends most of his time at the zinc of the Closerie des Lilas, schmoozing with collectors and artists, striking deals, and skimming his fat commission off every painting he sells. He has no business in Montmartre anymore: all the painters whose work hangs on the walls of his palatial gallery on Boulevard Raspail have left Guillaume’s quartier for the leafy boulevards of Montparnasse, where the wine is better, the oysters fatter, and the women more beautiful. Guillaume pushed open the door and slid onto the chair next to Brataille.
The alcohol lingers sluggishly in his veins. How much had they drunk, in the end?
After they were three or four carafes to the good, Emile Brataille made his mournful confession: he’d come to Montmartre to declare his love for Thérèse, but she wanted nothing to do with him. And so here he was, drowning his sorrows.
Thérèse is a prostitute who works at the corner of Rue des Abbesses and Rue Ravignan, next to Le Chat Blanc. Guillaume knows her, albeit not professionally: he has painted her many times. Lubricated by the wine, he embellished this acquaintance into a devoted friendship, and suggested to Brataille that he might be able to intercede on his behalf. At this, the art dealer began to weep drunken tears of gratitude. How can I ever repay you? he asked. Guillaume scratched his chin. I don’t suppose you know any rich, art-loving Americans, he said.
You know that feeling when you’re at work, and you’ve had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you’re a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you’re Murderbot.
Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you’ll read this century.
—
I’m usually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.
When Murderbot’s human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action.
Drastic action it is, then.
”Excerpt”
I’ve had clients who thought they needed an absurd level of security. (And I’m talking absurd even by my standards, and my code was developed by a bond company known for intense xenophobic paranoia, tempered only by desperate greed.) I’ve also had clients who thought they didn’t need any security at all, right up until something ate them. (That’s mostly a metaphor. My uneaten client stat is high.)
Dr. Arada, who is what her marital partner Overse calls a “terminal optimist,” was somewhere in the comfortable middle zone. Dr. Thiago was firmly in the “Let’s investigate the dark cave without that pesky SecUnit” group. Which was why Arada was pressed against the wall next to the hatch to the open observation deck with her palms sweating on the stock of a projectile weapon and Thiago was standing out on said observation deck, trying to reason with a potential target. (That’s “potential” per the earlier conversation where Dr. Arada said Oh SecUnit, I wish you wouldn’t call people “targets” and Thiago had given me the look that usually means It just wants an excuse to kill someone.)
But then, that was before the Potential Targets started to brandish their own large projectile-weapon collection.
Anyway, those are the kind of things I think about while I’m swimming under a raider vessel that’s attempting to board our sea research facility.
I swam out from under the stern, careful to avoid the propulsion device. I broke the surface quietly, stretched and caught the railing, and pulled myself up. The daylight was bright, the air clear, and I felt exposed. (Why couldn’t the stupid raiders attack at night?) I had drones in the air, giving me camera views of both decks of this stupid boat, so I knew this part of the stern was empty.
The superstructure above me was triangular, angled back in a way to make it faster or something, I don’t know, I’m a murderbot, I don’t give a crap about boats. The upper deck wrapped around the bow where the forward weapon emplacement was. It gave the stupid boat a lot of blindspots, which were someone else’s security nightmare. It was more sophisticated than the other boats we’d seen on this survey, with better tech.
Of course that just made it vulnerable.
I was also monitoring our outer perimeter and the scattered islands surrounding us, in case this was a distraction and there was a second boarding attempt planned. And of course I had a camera on the unfolding shitshow on the observation deck.
Thiago stood out there nearly four meters from the hatchway, not even wearing his protective gear, very much like a human who didn’t trust his SecUnit’s situation assessment. The apparent leader of the Potential Targets stood at the edge of the deck, barely three meters away, casually pointing a projectile weapon at Thiago. I was more worried about the six other Potential Targets scattered around on the stupid boat’s bow deck, and the nozzle of the weapon mounted above the bow deck currently trained on the upper level of our facility.
Some of the Potential Targets weren’t wearing helmets. There’s a thing you can do with these small intel drones (if your client orders you to, or if you don’t have a working governor module), when the hostiles are dumb enough to get aggressive without adequate body armor. You can accelerate a drone and send it straight at the hostile’s face. Even if you don’t hit an eye or ear and go straight through to the brain, you can make a crater in the skull. Doing this would solve the problem and get me back to new episodes of Lineages of the Sun much more quickly, but I knew Arada would make a sad face at me and Thiago would be pissed off. I would probably have to do it anyway. Unfortunately, Potential Target Leader was wearing a helmet.
(Thiago is a marital partner of Dr. Mensah’s brother, which is why I gave a crap about his opinion.)
Also, I had no intel yet on how many hostiles were inside the boat where the controls to the large weapon were. Prematurely eliminating the visible targets (excuse me, potential targets) on deck might just tip us out of incipient shitshow into full-on shitshow.
There was sort of a chance that Thiago might actually talk our way out of this. He was great at talking to other humans. But I had a drone waiting just inside the hatchway with Arada. (Overse would be upset if I let her marital partner get killed, and I liked Arada.)
Still managing to sound calm despite everything, Thiago said, “There’s no need for any of this. We’re researchers, we’re not doing anything to hurt anyone here.”
Potential Target Leader said something that our FacilitySystem translated through our feed as, “I showed you I’m serious. We’ll take what we want, then leave you in peace. Tell the others to come out.”
“We’ll give you supplies, but not people,” Thiago said.
“If you have nice supplies, I’ll leave the people.”
“You didn’t have to shoot anyone.” Heat crept into Thiago’s voice. “If you needed supplies, we would have given them to you.”
Don’t worry, the “anyone” who got shot was me.
(Thiago, while violating the security protocol everyone agreed to IN ADVANCE, had walked out to the observation deck to greet the strangers on their stupid boat. I followed and pulled him back from the edge, and so Potential Target Leader shot me instead of him. Got me right in the shoulder. I managed to fall off the observation deck and miss the water intake. Yes, I was pissed off.
“SecUnit, SecUnit, are you there—” Overse, in the facility’s command center, had shouted at me over the comm interface.
Yes, I’m fine, I’d sent her over the feed. It’s a good thing I don’t bleed like a human because hostile marine fauna was about all this situation needed. I’ve got everything under fucking control, okay.
“No, it says it’s fine,” I heard her relaying to the others on our comm. “Well, yes, it’s furious.”)
I swung over the railing and dropped to the deck. I’d tuned my pain sensors down but I could feel the projectile wedged in next to my support framework and it was annoying. Staying low, I crawled down the steps into the first cabin structure. The human inside was monitoring a primitive scanner system. (I’d jammed it even before I got shot, feeding it artistic static and random reports of anomalous energy signatures to keep it busy.) I choked her until she was unconscious and then broke her arm to give her something else to worry about if she revived too soon. I didn’t take her projectile weapon but I did pause to break a couple of its key components.
The room was stuffed with bags and containers and other human crap. There were neat storage racks but everything was jumbled on the deck. We had seen eleven groups of strange humans in water boats from a distance, and had been contacted by two of them. Both had been what Thiago called “unusually divergent” and some of the others had called deeply weird. Both groups had taken the same elaborate precautions to show they were approaching in a non-hostile manner and had not displayed any weapons. Both groups had wanted to trade supplies with us. (Arada and the others had wanted to just give them what they needed, but Thiago had asked them to trade their stories of why they were here on this planet.)
So okay, maybe Thiago had reason to suppose this group would also be non-hostile. But the earlier groups had given me a chance to develop a profile of local non-hostile approaches/interactions and this group hadn’t fit.
