World Literature Women

Claire Powell’s life is turned upside down when her beloved husband admits to a “near affair.” But when Stephen accepts a partnership with an Atlanta law firm without consulting her and buys a historic Southern home sight-unseen―it pushes their already-fractured marriage to the breaking point. Claire’s world spirals, and she soon finds herself in a marriage she no longer wants, in a house she never asked for.

In her long-awaited new novel, Lee explores with devastating poignancy the emotions, identities, and relationships of three very different American women living in the same small expat community in Hong Kong. As each woman struggles with her own demons, their lives collide in ways that have irreversible consequences for them all. Atmospheric, moving, and utterly compelling, The Expatriates confirms Lee as an exceptional talent and one of our keenest observers of women’s inner lives.

From internationally best-selling author and “rising star of Southern fiction” (Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times best-selling author) Kristy Woodson Harvey comes the third novel in her Peachtree Bluff series, in which a secret threatens the tight-knit bond between a trio of sisters and their mother.

The recipe for forgiveness begins with an open heart and a full belly. Sisters Rose Tillman and her sister Marvina Nash haven't spoken in decades—not since Rose sent Marvina $40 to register their business and Marvina used that money for her own personal purposes. Now retired, Rose wants to open the restaurant they'd once dreamed of. But, to her horror, Rose realizes she's forgotten their mother's secret spice mix recipe, known to only one other person in the world.

Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished, and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations.

On one extraordinary day in 1940, Miriam Talan’s comfortable life is shattered. While she gives birth to her second child, a son she and her husband, Max, name Monya, the Soviets invade the Baltic state of Latvia and occupy the capital city of Riga, her home. Because the Talans are Jewish, the Soviets confiscate Max’s business and the family’s house and bank accounts, leaving them with nothing.

When Jo Breen uses her divorce settlement to buy a neglected property in the Byron Bay hinterland, she is hoping for a tree change, and a blossoming connection to the land of her Aboriginal ancestors. What she discovers instead is sharp dissent from her teenage daughter, trouble brewing from unimpressed white neighbours and a looming Native Title war between the local Bundjalung families. When Jo unexpectedly finds love on one side of the Native Title divide she quickly learns that living on country is only part of the recipe for the Good Life.

1945, Auschwitz: I stumble out of the gates, tightly grasping the hands of two smaller children. Hunger swirls in my stomach and the barren landscape swims before my eyes. I can barely believe it. We’re free. We survived. But what happens now… Sixteen-year-old Tasha Ancel turns to take one last look at the imposing place that stole her freedom and her childhood. She has no idea how she continued to live when so many others did not. For the first time in months, her heart beats with hope for her future and that of the smaller children who cling to her now.

Navajo Nation Police Officer Bernadette Manualito witnesses the cold-blooded shooting of someone very close to her. With the victim fighting for his life, the entire squad and the local FBI office are hell-bent on catching the gunman. Bernie, too, wants in on the investigation, despite regulations forbidding eyewitness involvement. But that doesn't mean she's going to sit idly by, especially when her husband, Sergeant Jim Chee, is in charge of finding the shooter. Bernie and Chee discover that a cold case involving his former boss and partner, retired Inspector Joe Leaphorn, may hold the key.

From the author of The Lost Girls of Paris comes a riveting tale of courage and unlikely friendship during World War II - now a New York Times best seller.

Occupied France, 1940. When the staff at a field hospital draw straws to find out who will join the evacuation from Dunkirk, Nurse Cate is left behind. But when the Nazis arrive to claim prisoners of war, she takes her chance and flees into the night, taking one patient with her. Fifty miles away, the surrendering soldiers of the Royal Norfolk Regiment are shot dead by the advancing Germans. Beneath the pile of bodies two men survive, crawling to the safety of a nearby farmhouse, where sisters Elise and Adelaide risk their lives to take them in.

In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.

The moment I encounter the beautiful tour guide, it’s clear I'll stop at nothing until she’s mine. She’s a spitfire. Doesn’t hold her tongue for anyone, especially not me. Women fall hard for me. Not Kara. She wants nothing to do with me. Well, at least that’s what she keeps telling herself. A few of the men in the small town of Talkeetna want to be with Kara. Won’t happen. I’ll show Kara I’m the man for her.

Indian American journalist Smita has returned to India to cover a story, but reluctantly: long ago she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. As she follows the case of Meena—a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village and her own family for marrying a Muslim man—Smita comes face to face with a society where tradition carries more weight than one’s own heart, and a story that threatens to unearth the painful secrets of Smita’s own past.

In the autumn of 1948, Iris Digby vanishes from her London home with her American diplomat husband and their two children. The world is shocked by the family’s sensational disappearance. Were they eliminated by the Soviet intelligence service? Or have the Digbys defected to Moscow with a trove of the West’s most vital secrets?

Clara Button is no ordinary librarian. While war ravages the city above her, Clara has risked everything she holds dear to turn the Bethnal Green tube station into the country’s only underground library. Down here, a secret community thrives with thousands of bunk beds, a nursery, a café, and a theater—offering shelter, solace, and escape from the bombs that fall upon their city. Along with her glamorous best friend and assistant Ruby Munroe, Clara ensures the library is the beating heart of life underground. As the war drags on, the women's determination is tested to the limits.

The Bahamas, 1941. Newly widowed Leonora “Lulu” Randolph arrives in Nassau to investigate the governor and his wife for a New York society magazine. After all, American readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the duke and duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarchy to its knees five years earlier. What more intriguing backdrop for their romance than a wartime Caribbean paradise, a colonial playground for kingpins of ill-gotten empires? Or so Lulu imagines.

From the award-winning, best-selling author of When I Was Puerto Rican, a powerful novel of family, race, faith, sex, and disaster that moves between Puerto Rico and the Bronx, revealing the lives and loves of five women and the secret that binds them together.

From the author of The School for German Brides, this captivating historical novel set in nineteenth-century and post-World War II Paris follows two fierce women of the same family, generations apart, who find that their futures lie in the four walls of a simple bakery in a tiny corner of Montmartre.

Beginning with the fateful meeting of a 19th-century Yankee sailor and the runaway daughter of a Tahitian chief, and sweeping over a century and a half of passionate, turbulent Hawaiian history, Shark Dialogues takes its place as the first novel to do justice to the rich heritage and cruel conflicts of the beautiful and beleaguered islands and their people.