Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.

Amy Wilson has always been an ultimate helper. As a big sister, Girl Scout, faithful reader of teen magazines, personal assistant, sitcom sidekick, and, finally, mother of three, Amy believed it was her destiny to be a people pleaser. She learned to put others first, to do what she was told, to finish what she started, and to look like she had everything under control, even when she very much did not. Along the way, Amy started to wonder why doing it all had been her job.

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin?

It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.

Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped. Now he is. . . Without a home Waiting for his stand-up career to take off Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking. Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story…

It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed relationship." They become lovers, and the narrator's feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf's diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.

An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world. Add two children. And a horse. From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.

Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived. The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal.

Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

When 276 schoolgirls are abducted from their school in Nigeria, Fidelis Ewerike, a Florida-based barrister, poet, and former POW of the Nigerian Civil War, begins to go mad, consumed by memories of his younger sister Ugochi, who went missing during that conflict. Consumed by survivor’s guilt and fearful that the same fate awaits Amara, his sixteen-year-old daughter who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ugochi, Fidelis locks her in her bedroom, offering no words of explanation, only lovingly—if poorly—made meals and sweets.

Gravesend, Brooklyn, 1986: Risa Franzone lives in a ground-floor apartment on Saint of the Narrows Street with her bad-seed husband, Saverio, and their eight-month-old baby, Fabrizio. Risa is a loving mother, a faithful wife, a saintly neighbor—but lately, her husband’s slow dive into criminality and abuse has threatened her peace, raising concerns about her and her baby’s safety. On the night her younger sister, Giulia, moves in with Risa to recover from a bad break-up, a fateful accident occurs.

Ruth is lost. She’s living in a drafty Victorian with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with a lingerie habit, overdosing on television and regretting her master’s degree. When she starts dancing at a strip club, she becomes Baby Blue, seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike. Plunged into this swirling underworld of beautiful women, fast cash, ungodly hours, and strangers’ secrets, Baby’s grip on reality begins to loosen. She is sure she can handle it—until one autumn morning when Dino disappears without a trace.

1994: When Gardas Julia Harte and Adrian Clancy are called out to a sleepy housing estate in Cork to investigate a noise complaint, they are entirely unprepared for what they find. What happens next will haunt Julia for the rest of her career, leaving her plagued with nightmares and terrified of the dark. There is a serial killer at work in Cork, one as clever as he is deadly. Julia may not be a detective yet, but after the harrowing events of that night, she is determined to be the one to catch him…

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

A new age of exploration and innovation has dawned, and the Empire of the Wolf stands to take its place as the foremost power in the known world. Glory and riches await. But dark days are coming. A mysterious plague has broken out in the pagan kingdoms to the north, while in the south, the Empire’s proxy war in the lands of the wolfmen is weeks away from total collapse. Worse still is the message brought to the Empress by two heretic monks, who claim to have lost contact with the spirits of the afterlife.

A book like no other, I Am Maria weaves Shriver’s hard-earned wisdom with her own deeply personal poetry. I Am Maria reminds listeners there is strength and love on the other side of all of our hardest days.

Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

For fifty years, Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now. Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew.

Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.