Literary Fiction Ebooks

A debut novel of female friendship and coming-of-age from Jazmina Barrera, acclaimed author of Linea Nigra and On Lighthouses, translated by Christina MacSweeney. It was meant to be the trip of a lifetime. Mila, Citlali, and Dalia, childhood friends now college aged, leave Mexico City for the England of The Clash and the Paris of Courbet. They anticipate the cafés and crushes, but not the early signs that they are each steadily, inevitably changing.  That feels like forever ago. Mila, now a writer and a new mother, has just published a book on needlecraft—an art form so long dismissed as “women’s work.” But after learning Citlali has drowned, Mila begins to sift through her old scrapbooks, reflecting on their shared youth for the first time as a new wife and mother. What has come of all the nights the three friends spent embroidering together in silence? Did she miss the signs that Citlali needed help?

From Booker Prize Finalist and bestselling author of “pitch perfect” (Boston Globe) Small Things Like These, comes a triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men. Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, considered “among the form’s most masterful practitioners” (New York Times), Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.  In “So Late in the Day,” Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently; in “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions; and in “Antarctica,” a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.  Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and men: a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 • NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A prophetic masterpiece." — Ron Charles, Washington Post On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what—or who—is she willing to leave behind? The winner of the Booker Prize 2023 and a critically acclaimed national bestseller, Prophet Song presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.

A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years An ambitious, delirious novel that tangles with queerness, spirituality, and generational silence, City of Laughter announces Temim Fruchter as a fresh and assured new literary voice. The tale of a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets, the novel follows her back to her family’s origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire. Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century. In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family’s mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks. What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present. Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.

A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours "Ravishingly beautiful." — Joshua Ferris, New York Times A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.  Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.

BARNES & NOBLE'S APRIL BOOK CLUB PICK • A career defining tour-de-force from New York Times bestselling, award-winning and “formidably gifted” (Chicago Tribune) author of Peace Like a River Leif Enger. “A rare, remarkable book to be kept and reread—for its beauty of language, its gentle wisdom and its steady, unflagging hope.” — Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune A storyteller “of great humanity and huge heart” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), Leif Enger debuted in the literary world with Peace Like a River which sold over a million copies and captured readers’ hearts around the globe. Now comes a new milestone in this boldly imaginative author’s accomplished, resonant body of work. Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake. I Cheerfully Refuse epitomizes the “musical, sometimes magical and deeply satisfying kind of storytelling” (Los Angeles Times) for which Leif Enger is cherished. A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, this latest novel is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future.

The third title in Roxane Gay Books’ inaugural list, Hot Springs Drive is an urgent, vicious blade of a novel about a shocking betrayal and its aftermath, asking just how far you’ll go to have everything you want Jackie Stinson’s best friend is dead, and everyone knows who killed her. Jackie wants to be many things, but a martyr has never been one of them. She is an ex–emotional eater and mother of four, who has finally lost the weight she long yearned to be free of. In her new, sharp-edged body, she goes by Jacqueline. But leaving her old self behind proves harder than she ever imagined. And while she believes she should be happier, misery still chases her, and motherhood threatens to subsume what little is left of her. Jacqueline’s only salve is her best friend Theresa, whose seemingly perfect life she desperately covets. Since they met in the maternity ward fifteen years earlier, the two have survived the trials of motherhood side by side—Theresa with her quiet, cherubic daughter, and Jacqueline with her rambunctious, unruly boys. Their bond is tight, but it is not enough to keep Jacqueline, finally moving through the world in the body she has always wanted, from stealing a bit of Theresa’s perfect life. Hot Springs Drive is a dark, heart-pounding exploration of one woman’s deepest desires, and how the consequences of betrayal can ripple outward beyond the initial strike point. In her third and fiercest novel, acclaimed literary voice Lindsay Hunter deftly peels back the fragile veneer of two suburban families and the secrets roiling between them.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE A son’s collapse pulls his two mothers together and apart in a novel that probes the limits of love, hope, and forgiveness In Norway, thousands of miles from home, a student drops dead on the street. A passerby revives his heart, but he remains in a coma from which he may never wake. His mothers rush across the continent to his bedside where they endure the strain of helpless waiting. As the tense hospital vigil continues day after day and they vacillate between extremes of hope, fear, and psychic pain, their troubled relationship is pushed to the edge. A profound exploration of a family in crisis, Trondheim portrays the way each woman copes with the looming tragedy and the possibility of healing in the wake of a life-altering emergency.