New York Times bestselling author Peter Swanson pens a spectacularly spine-chilling novella in which an American art student in London is invited to join a classmate for the holidays at Starvewood Hall, her family\u2019s Cotswold manor house. But behind the holly and pine boughs, secrets are about to unravel, revealing this seemingly charming English village\u2019s grim history.<\/em><\/p>\n Ashley Smith, an American art student in London for her junior year, was planning on spending Christmas alone, but a last-minute invitation from fellow student Emma Chapman brings her to Starvewood Hall, country residence of the Chapman family. The Cotswold manor house, festooned in pine boughs and crammed with guests for Christmas week, is a dream come true for Ashley. She is mesmerized by the cozy, firelit house, the large family, and the charming village of Clevemoor, but also by Adam Chapman, Emma\u2019s aloof and handsome brother.<\/em><\/p>\n But Adam is being investigated by the local police over the recent brutal slaying of a girl from the village, and there is a mysterious stranger who haunts the woodland path between Starvewood Hall and the local pub. Ashley begins to wonder what kind of story she is actually inhabiting. Is she in a grand romance? A gothic tale? Or has she wandered into something far more sinister and terrifying than she\u2019d ever imagined?<\/em><\/p>\n Over thirty years later the events of that horrific week are revisited, along with a diary from that time. What began in a small English village in 1989 reaches its ghostly conclusion in modern-day New York, many Christmas seasons later.<\/em> – William Morrow<\/p>\n This title is 96 pages.<\/p>\n ____________________<\/p>\n What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma, and an unraveling America? What it\u2019s always been\u2014a love song.<\/em><\/p>\n Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating miscarriage and Noah\u2019s fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher\u2014contributing white, Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones for any potential child\u2014is just as desperate to keep trying.<\/em><\/p>\n Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood, and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As the future shifts once again, she must decide yet again what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be. Fearless, timely, blazing with voice, Blue Hour is a fragmentary novel with unignorable storytelling power.<\/em> – Soft Skull Press<\/p>\n This title is 140 pages.<\/p>\n ____________________<\/p>\n There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn’t her story.<\/em><\/p>\n Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?<\/em><\/p>\n But nothing with fairies is ever simple.<\/em><\/p>\n Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He’s heard there’s a curse here that needs breaking, but it’s a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold\u2026<\/em> – Tor Books, imprint of MacMillan Publishers<\/p>\n This title is 116 pages.<\/p>\n ____________________<\/p>\n In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a caf\u00e9 in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants \u201creturning\u201d to a country she\u2019s never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire\u2014for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other\u2014takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.<\/em><\/p>\n A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga\u2019s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?<\/em> – Graywolf Press<\/p>\n This title is 186 pages.<\/p>\n ____________________<\/p>\n In the tradition of Mira Grant and Stephen Graham Jones, Malcolm Devlin\u2019s And Then I Woke Up is a creepy, layered, literary story about false narratives and their ability to divide us.<\/em><\/p>\n In a world reeling from an unusual plague, monsters lurk in the streets while terrified survivors arm themselves and roam the countryside in packs. Or perhaps something very different is happening. When a disease affects how reality is perceived, it\u2019s hard to be certain of anything\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n Spence is one of the \u201ccured\u201d living at the Ironside rehabilitation facility. Haunted by guilt, he refuses to face the changed world until a new inmate challenges him to help her find her old crew. But if he can\u2019t tell the truth from the lies, how will he know if he has earned the redemption he dreams of? How will he know he hasn\u2019t just made things worse?<\/em> – Tordotcom, imprint of MacMillan Publishers<\/p>\n This title is 167 pages.<\/p>\n ____________________<\/p>\n In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists\u2014he a photographer, she a dancer\u2014and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control.<\/em><\/p>\n Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty.<\/em><\/p>\n This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent.<\/em> – Black Cat, imprint of Grove Atlantic<\/p>\n This title is 166 pages.<\/p>\n ____________________<\/p>\n Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Go to college, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy an apartment. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going.<\/em><\/p>\n The narrator of Assembly is a black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend\u2019s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can\u2019t escape the question: is it time to take it all apart?<\/em><\/p>\n Assembly is a story about the stories we live within \u2013 those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers.And it is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life. With a steely, unfaltering gaze, Natasha Brown dismantles the mythology of whiteness, lining up the debris in a neat row and walking away.<\/em> – Little, Brown and Company<\/p>\n This title is 106 pages.<\/p>\n ____________________<\/p>\n Nonfiction:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies.<\/em><\/p>\n The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world\u2013for us all.<\/em> – Berett-Koehler Publishers<\/p>\n This title is 159 pages.<\/p>\n ____________________<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I say that I was a feminist in kindergarten, I am not exaggerating,\u201d begins Isabel Allende. As a child, she watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children without \u201cresources or voice.\u201d Isabel became a fierce and defiant little girl, determined to fight for the life her mother couldn\u2019t have.<\/em><\/p>\n As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the second wave of feminism. Among a tribe of like-minded female journalists, Allende for the first time felt comfortable in her own skin, as they wrote \u201cwith a knife between our teeth\u201d about women\u2019s issues. She has seen what the movement has accomplished in the course of her lifetime. And over the course of three passionate marriages, she has learned how to grow as a woman while having a partner, when to step away, and the rewards of embracing one\u2019s sexuality.<\/em><\/p>\n So what feeds the soul of feminists\u2014and all women\u2014today? To be safe, to be valued, to live in peace, to have their own resources, to be connected, to have control over our bodies and lives, and above all, to be loved. On all these fronts, there is much work yet to be done, and this book, Allende hopes, will \u201clight the torches of our daughters and granddaughters with mine. They will have to live for us, as we lived for our mothers, and carry on with the work still left to be finished.\u201d<\/em> – Ballantine Books<\/p>\n This title is 174 pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/the-christmas-guest.jpg?resize=200%2C309&ssl=1\")
<\/a>The Christmas Guest<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Peter Swanson<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/blue-hour1.jpg?resize=200%2C310&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Blue Hour<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Tiffany Clarke Harrison<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/thornhedge.jpg?resize=200%2C320&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Thornhedge<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by T. Kingfisher<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/if-an-egyptian-cannot-speak-english.jpg?resize=200%2C301&ssl=1\")
<\/a>If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Noor Naga<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/and-then-i-woke-up.jpg?resize=200%2C320&ssl=1\")
<\/a>And Then I Woke Up<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Malcolm Devlin<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/open-water.jpg?resize=200%2C323&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Open Water<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Caleb Azumah Nelson<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/assembly.jpg?resize=200%2C281&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Assembly<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Natasha Brown<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/this-body-is-not-an-apology.jpg?resize=200%2C310&ssl=1\")
<\/a>This Body is Not an Apology<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Sonya Renee Taylor<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/the-soul-of-a-woman1.jpg?resize=200%2C303&ssl=1\")
<\/a>The Soul of a Woman<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Isabel Allende<\/p>\n