New Books
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The Singer Sisters
Two generations of a folk-rock dynasty collide over art, love, longing, and family secrets in this captivating and poignant debut
It's 1996, and alt-rocker Emma Cantor is on tour, with her sights trained on a record deal. Emma’s got no lack of inspiration for her music — chiefly her mother Judie, a 1960s folk legend whose confessional songs made her an icon before her mysterious withdrawal from the public eye. Emma is baffled by Judie's coldness, and is deeply shaken when she learns a long-kept secret about their family. When Emma uncovers more about her mother's past, she is vaulted to new heights as a performer. But the knowledge she gains also propels her toward a musical betrayal that further fractures her relationship with Judie. Increasingly famous, but fragile and isolated, Emma grapples with her mother’s legacy and what it means for her own future.
With the richness of a beloved folk song, The Singer Sisters moves between ’60s folk clubs and ’90s music festivals, chronicling the ups and downs of stardom while asking what women artists must sacrifice for success. -
The Champagne Letters
Perfect for fans of bubbly wine and Kristin Harmel, this historical fiction novel follows Mme. Clicquot as she builds her legacy, and the modern divorcée who looks to her letters for inspiration.
Reims, France, 1805: Barbe-Nicole Clicquot has just lost her beloved husband but is determined to pursue their dream of creating the premier champagne house in France, now named for her new identity as a widow: Veuve Clicquot. With the Russians poised to invade, competitors fighting for her customers, and the Napoleonic court politics complicating matters she must set herself apart quickly and permanently if she, and her business, are to survive.
In present day Chicago, broken from her divorce, Natalie Taylor runs away to Paris. In a book stall by the Seine, Natalie finds a collection of the Widow Clicquot’s published letters and uses them as inspiration to step out of her comfort zone and create a new, empowered life for herself. But when her Parisian escape takes a shocking and unexpected turn, she’s forced to make a choice. Should she accept her losses and return home, or fight for the future she’s only dreamed about? What would the widow do? -
An Insignificant Case
A new standalone legal thriller from the international bestselling author of GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.
Charlie Webb is a third rate lawyer who graduated from a third rate law-school and, because he couldn’t get hired by any of the major law firms, has opened his own law firm, where he gets by handling cases for dubious associates from his youth and some court appointed cases. Described as “a leaky boat floating down the stream of life,” Charlie has led unremarkable life, personally and professionally. Until he’s appointed to be the attorney for a decidedly crackpot artist who calls himself Guido Sabatini (born Lawrence Weiss). Sabatini has been arrested – again – for breaking into a restaurant and stealing back a painting he sold them because he was insulted by where it was displayed. But as Lawrence Weiss, he’s also an accomplished card shark and burglar and while he was there, he stole a thumb drive from the owner’s safe.
Not knowing what else Sabatani has stolen, Webb negotiates the return of the painting and “other items’ for the owner dropping charges against Sabatini. But the contents of the flash drive threatens very powerful figures who are determined to retrieve it, the restaurant owner (Gretchen Hall) and her driver (Yuri Makarov) are being investigated for the sex trafficking of minors, and there are others who have a violent grudge against Sabatini. When a minor theft case becomes a double homicide, and even more, Charlie Webb, an insignificant lawyer assigned to an insignificant case, is faced with the most important, and deadliest, case of his life. Going back to his long-time bestselling roots, Phillip Margolin returns with a brilliant standalone legal thriller in the tradition of John Grisham. -
In the Garden of Monsters
A Goodreads Most Anticipated Historical Fiction Book of Fall 2024
"A sinister romance and hypnotic Gothic fairytale--surreal and luscious with a fascinating twist on the story of Hades and Persephone." --Jennifer Saint, bestselling author of Ariadne
A woman with no past. A man who seems to know her. And a monstrous garden that could be the border between their worlds...
Italy, 1948
Julia Lombardi is a mystery even to herself. The beautiful model can't remember where she's from, where she's been or how she came to live in Rome. When she receives an offer to accompany celebrated eccentric artist Salvador Dalí to the Sacro Bosco--Italy's Garden of Monsters--as his muse, she's strangely compelled to accept. It could be a chance to unlock the truth about her past...
Shrouded in shadow, the garden full of giant statues that sometimes seem alive is far from welcoming. Still, from the moment of their arrival at the palazzo, Julia is inexplicably drawn to their darkly enigmatic host, Ignazio. He's alluring yet terrifying--and he seems to know her.
Posing for Dalí as the goddess Persephone, Julia finds the work to be perplexing, particularly as Dalí descends deeper into his fanaticism. To him, she is Persephone, and he insists she must eat pomegranate seeds to rejoin her king.
Between Dalí's fevered persistence, Ignazio's uncanny familiarity and the agonizing whispered warnings that echo through the garden, Julia is soon on the verge of unraveling. And she begins to wonder if she's truly the mythical queen of the Underworld...
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I Made It Out of Clay
In this darkly funny and surprisingly sweet novel, a woman creates a golem in a desperate attempt to pretend her life is a rom-com rather than a disaster.
Nothing's going well for Eve: she's single, turning forty, stressed at work and anxious about a recent series of increasingly creepy incidents. Most devastatingly, her beloved father died last year, and her family still won't acknowledge their sorrow.
With her younger sister's wedding rapidly approaching, Eve is on the verge of panic. She can't bear to attend the event alone. That's when she recalls a strange story her Yiddish grandmother once told her, about a protector forged of desperation...and Eve, to her own shock, manages to create a golem.
At first, everything seems great. The golem is indeed protective--and also attractive. But when they head out to a rural summer camp for the family wedding, Eve's lighthearted rom-com fantasy swiftly mudslides into something much darker.
With moments of moodiness, fierce love and unexpected laughter, I Made It Out of Clay will make you see monsters everywhere.
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A Killer Clue
Perfect for fans of Anthony Horowitz and Jenn McKinlay, acclaimed author Victoria Gilbert is back with more devious clues and deadly secrets as Hunter and Clewe take on a new case in the second Hunter and Clewe mystery.
When Eloise Anderson, the owner of an antiquarian bookshop, arrives at the grand Aircroft estate to ask retired librarian Jane Hunter and eccentric collector Cameron Clewe for help, Jane and Cam expect a bookish inquiry. But the bookseller has a different sort of assistance in mind—clearing her mother’s name of a murder Eloise is convinced she didn’t commit.
Eloise’s mother has just died after spending many years in prison for allegedly killing Eloise’s father. Armed with new information found in her mother’s effects, the bookseller is determined to uncover the true killer so her mother can rest in peace, even though the case is now colder than ice. When Jane tracks down the original detective from the investigation and discovers him stabbed to death in Eloise’s bookshop, Jane and Cam are sure this murder is connected to the cold case. They think it’s the same killer, but the police unfortunately have their own prime suspect, and this time around it’s Eloise.
Cam and Jane’s cold-case sleuthing turns urgent—find who committed the murders or watch another innocent woman rot in jail as a cold-blooded killer walks free. -
Guide Me Home
In this stunning culmination of the award-winning Highway 59 trilogy, Detective Darren Mathews is pulled out of an early retirement to investigate the case of a missing black college student from an all-white sorority and soon finds a town that will stop at nothing to keep its secrets hidden.
Texas Ranger Darren Mathews isn't sure he's been a good cop, but believes he's got a shot at being a good man--if he manages to dodge the potential indictment hanging over his head and if he, from here on out, pledges allegiance to the truth. It's a virtue the country appears to have wholly lost its grip on, but one Darren sees as his salvation. He is in the midst of remaking his life with the woman he loves, hoping for the peace of country living at his beloved farmhouse, when he is visited by someone who couldn't hold the truth on her tongue if it was dipped in sugar, a woman who's always been bent of tearing his life apart. His mother. Armed with a tall tale about a missing Black college student, Sera (whose white sorority sisters insist she isn't missing at all). Darren must decide if his can trust his mother is telling the truth--and what her ulterior motive may be, and what if that motive has to do with a grand jury deciding his fate.
Darren gets his hooks into the investigation, along the way discovering things about Sera's family and her hometown that are odd at best, vaguely sinister at worst. Hamstrung by local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers who likewise doubt the account of a missing girl, if Darren wants answers, he'll need help from the person whom he swore to never trust again--his mother.
In this emotionally stirring conclusion to the singular Highway 59 series, set three years after the events of Heaven, My Home, Darren reckons with his life's purpose as he's forced to choose between his own peace and the higher call to do good. -
Agony Hill
Set in rural Vermont in the volatile 1960s, Agony Hill is the first novel in a new historical series full of vivid New England atmosphere and the deeply drawn characters that are Sarah Stewart Taylor's trademark.
In the hot summer of 1965, Bostonian Franklin Warren arrives in Bethany, Vermont, to take a position as a detective with the state police. Warren's new home is on the verge of monumental change; the interstates under construction will bring new people, new opportunities, and new problems to Vermont, and the Cold War and protests against the war in Vietnam have finally reached the dirt roads and rolling pastures of Bethany.
Warren has barely unpacked when he's called up to a remote farm on Agony Hill. Former New Yorker and Back-to-the-Lander Hugh Weber seems to have set fire to his barn and himself, with the door barred from the inside, but things aren’t adding up for Warren. The people of Bethany—from Weber’s enigmatic wife to Warren's neighbor, widow and amateur detective Alice Bellows — clearly have secrets they’d like to keep, but Warren can’t tell if the truth about Weber’s death is one of them. As he gets to know his new home and grapples with the tragedy that brought him there, Warren is drawn to the people and traditions of small town Vermont, even as he finds darkness amidst the beauty. -
Private Rites
From the BELOVED, AWARD-WINNING author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world
“One of my FAVORITE NOVELS of the past few years.” —Jeff VanderMeer, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING author of Annihilation
It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.
The sisters are more estranged than ever, and their lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams, Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling, and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters’ lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world. -
Dogs and Monsters
From the "terrifyingly talented" (London Times) author of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG-IN THE NIGHT-TIME and THE PORPOISE, eight mesmerizingly imaginative, deeply-humane stories that use Greek myths and contemporary dystopian narratives to examine mortality, moral choices and the many variants of love.
Greek myths have fascinated people for millenia, seeing in them lessons about fate and hubris and the contingency of existence. Mark Haddon digs into the heart of these ancient fables and sees them anew. The dawn goddess Eos asked asks Zeus to give her lover Tithonus eternal life, but forgets to ask for eternal youth. In "The Quiet Limit of the World" Haddon imagines Tithonus' life as he slowly ages over thousands of years, turning the cautionary tale of tempting the gods into a spellbinding meditation on witnessing death from the outside, and ultimately, how carnal love evolves into something richer and more poignant with time. In "The Mother's Story," Haddon takes the myth of the minotaur in his labyrinth, in which the beast is the spawn of the monstrous lust of the king's wife Pasiphae, and turns it into a wrenching parable of maternal love for a damaged child, and the more real monstrosities of patriarchy. In "D.O.G.Z." the story of Actaeon, who was turned into a stag after glimpsing the naked goddess Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about the continuum of human and animal behavior.
Other stories play with contemporary mythic tropes - genetic engineering, trying to escape the future, the viciousness of adolescent ostracism - to showcase how modern humans are subject to the same capriciousness that obsessed the Greeks. Haddon's tales cover a vast range, from the mythic to the domestic, from ancient Greece to the present day, from stories about love to stories about cruelty, from battlefields to bed and breakfasts, from dogs in space to doors between worlds, all of them bound together by a profound sympathy and an understanding of how human beings act and think and feel when pushed to the very edge. Throughout Haddon's supple prose showcases his astonishing powers of observation, of both the physical world and the workings of the psyche. His vision is clear-eyed, but always resolutely empathetic.
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Deadbeat
The author of the “moving head-spinner of a novel” (John Connolly) The Other Side of Night returns with a taut thriller following a desperate single father as he searches for the anonymous employer who hired him as a hitman.
Peyton Collard was a good man once, but his life changed after a horrific car accident. Divorced, drunk, and severely damaged, Peyton is offered a life-changing sum of money to kill an evil man. But as he goes on a vigilante journey that leaves a trail of bodies across California, Peyton wonders about the identity of his anonymous patron. Soon, his questions become an obsession, and he embarks on a tense and potentially deadly investigation to discover the truth about the murders he’s committed. -
The Wildes
From the bestselling author of The Pale Blue Eye, Louis Bayard, comes Atonement meets The Paris Wife, a brilliantly original, profoundly empathetic story about Oscar Wilde's wife Constance and their two sons in the aftermath of the famous playwright's imprisonment for homosexuality, told against the backdrop of Victorian England and World War I.
In September of 1892, Oscar Wilde and his family retreated to the idyllic Norfolk countryside for a holiday. His wife, Constance, has every reason to be happy: two beautiful sons, a stellar reputation as an advocate for progressive causes, and a delightfully charming and affectionate husband and father, who is perhaps the most famous man in England. But as an assortment of houseguests arrive, including an aristocratic young wannabe poet named Lord Alfred Douglas, Constance gradually-and then all at once-comes to see that her husband's heart is elsewhere and that the growing intensity between the two men threatens the whole foundation of their lives.
The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts revolves around that fateful summer: what happened, and what might have been. When it was exposed, Oscar's affair with Lord Alfred Douglas-Bosie, as he was known-led to Wilde's imprisonment for homosexuality, and the financial and emotional ruin of his family. In Act Two, Bayard reveals Constance and their sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, in exile, forced to sell their possessions, leave England, and hide their identities. Act Three, from the perspective of Cyril, brings readers into the French trenches of World War I, where Cyril must grapple with the kind of man he wants to become, while Act Four reveals Vyvyan in London, years after the war, searching for answers from those who knew his parents. And in a brilliant act of the imagination, Act Five brings the entire cast back together in a surprising, poignant, and tremendously satisfying tableau.
With Louis Bayard's trademark sparkling dialogue, paired with his deep insight into the lives and longings of all his characters-and based on real events-The Wildes could almost have been created by Oscar Wilde himself: lightly told but with hidden depths, it is an entertaining and dramatic story about the human condition. -
Untethered
Sometimes family is found in the most unlikely of places . . .
In the small college town of Troy, Alabama, amidst the backdrop of 1967, Katia Daniels lives a life steeped in responsibility. At the Pike County Group Home for Negro Boys, she pours her heart into nurturing the young lives under her care, harboring a longing for children of her own. Katia's romantic entanglement with an older man brings comfort but also stirs questions about the path she's chosen.
The weight of her family's history bears down on her; a twin brother is missing in action in the heart of the Vietnam War. Having lost her father to cancer, Katia took up the mantle of caretaker, ensuring her mother and brothers were looked after. Her sense of duty extends to the boys at the group home, creating a web of obligations that stretches her emotional bandwidth thin.
Amidst a power struggle at work with the board, Katia finds solace in the pages of romance novels and the soothing melodies of Nina Simone. When Seth Taylor, a familiar face from her high school days, reenters Katia's life, he brings with him a breeze of nostalgia and a reminder of a time when her dreams felt less tethered. As their friendship rekindles, Katia grapples with the idea of making choices for herself, even as the realization that she can no longer have children weighs heavily on her.
This novel is a poignant tale of a woman torn between the demands of her heart and the responsibilities she's shouldered for so long. Set against the backdrop of a changing South, this novel delves into the complexities of love, family, and self-discovery in a time of transformation and upheaval.
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The Sunflower House
Family secrets come to light as a young woman fights to save herself, and others, in a Nazi-run baby factory—a real-life Handmaid's Tale—during World War II.
In a sleepy German village, Allina Strauss’s life seems idyllic: she works at her uncle’s bookshop, makes strudel with her aunt, and spends weekends with her friends and fiancé. But it's 1939, Adolf Hitler is Chancellor, and Allina’s family hides a terrifying secret—her birth mother was Jewish, making her a Mischling.
One fateful night after losing everyone she loves, Allina is forced into service as a nurse at a state-run baby factory called Hochland Home. There, she becomes both witness and participant to the horrors of Heinrich Himmler’s ruthless eugenics program.
The Sunflower House is a meticulously-researched debut historical novel from Adriana Allegri that uncovers the notorious Lebensborn Program of Nazi Germany. Women of “pure” blood stayed in Lebensborn homes for the sole purpose of perpetuating the Aryan population, giving birth to thousands of babies who were adopted out to “good” Nazi families. Allina must keep her Jewish identity a secret in order to survive, but when she discovers the neglect occurring within the home, she’s determined not only to save herself, but also the children in her care.
A tale of one woman’s determination to resist and survive, The Sunflower House is also a love story. When Allina meets Karl, a high-ranking SS officer with secrets of his own, the two must decide how much they are willing to share with each other—and how much they can stand to risk as they join forces to save as many children as they can. The threads of this poignant and heartrending novel weave a tale of loss and love, friendship and betrayal, and the secrets we bury in order to save ourselves. -
The Greatest Lie of All
A glamorous romance novelist and an aspiring starlet share an unexpected secret in this addictive story about love, ambition and how far we're willing to go to protect our hearts.
Fledgling actress Amelia Grant is at rock bottom when offered the opportunity of a lifetime: to star in a biopic about the world-renowned romance author Gloria Diamond, who used her own tragic love story as inspiration for her bestselling books. To prepare for the role, she'll spend a week with Gloria at her secluded Washington estate. It's a chance to get out of LA, away from her cheating ex-boyfriend, and to make her recently deceased mother proud.
Amelia's excitement is short-lived, however, once she actually meets Gloria, who is cold, verging on rude and mostly unavailable. If not for Gloria's frustratingly handsome son Will, the visit might be a complete waste of her time. But when Amelia stumbles upon a secret from Gloria's past, she realizes Gloria's life story is more fiction than fact. And as the movie's filming date draws nearer, Amelia must decide how much she's willing to sacrifice to uncover the truth.
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LML Staff: Best Reads of 2024
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