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A tale of two sisters braving the current of global tremors, mysterious beings, and their own past

Amihan is a respected and talented wildlife researcher on a small Pacific island in the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, where the land has undergone centuries of occupation. Offshore military testing, shifting climates, and tourists threaten the local ecosystem, making Amihan’s job harder than ever. As she braves knotty forests and watery caves in search of the elusive rufous fantail, her expedition takes her to the suicide cliffs . . . and over them. Amihan plummets into another realm, a purgatory of colonial violence and Filipino folklore.

Ligaya, Amihan’s sister, is back in Osaka and in between research positions when she is called to the island to search for her itinerant and reclusive sister. But when her search uncovers a stowaway, Ligaya's path takes an unexpected turn. Traveling along with her is a ghost with an omikuji tongue—a ghost that delights in spitting fortunes and mining memories. As Ligaya searches and Amihan wanders, it becomes clear that there is more to confront between these sisters than their whereabouts. On an island shuddering under the weight of global crises, can Ligaya make it to Amihan, or has her sister wandered too far?

The first major English translation of Marcelle Tinayre’s Belle Époque novel that interrogates the struggle of coming of age as a young woman in a changing modern world.

Raised in the countryside by her reclusive classicist uncle, Hellé’s ideals are put to the test when she encounters the decadence and frivolity of Parisian society. Yet there she also meets the young political theorist and resolute socialist Antoine Genesvrier, who urges Hellé and her uncle to join him in supporting the city’s poor and advocating for social justice. Meanwhile, Hellé’s head is turned by the poet Maurice Clairmont, hailed by Parisian society as “the new Byron” and eager to win over Hellé with his beauty and charm. Caught between her love of beauty and her burgeoning social concern, Hellé must choose between two men, two ideals, and two worlds, while also staying true to herself. Tinayre infuses Hellé’s voice with the classical allusions of her uncle’s education and her love for the natural world, creating a fresh, engaging narrative that awakens both the mind and heart.

In this first major English translation, Grace Ashton brings exquisite resonance of tone, register, and spirit to Marcelle Tinayre’s perennially relevant novel.

Giuliana Striano is forty years old and lives in Cape Town, South Africa. She is the daughter of Italian emigrants with a daughter of her own, Renata, now five years old. Upon the death of her mother, Giuliana learns that she had been adopted and given a new identity with a different name and a different date and place of birth. So Giuliana determines to find out who she really is, what is hidden in her past, and who her birth parents were. 

Her Name That Day the story of “another” Italy set in a region that only recently became Italian and whose characters are Croatian, Slovenian, Australian, and South African, as well as Italians, precariously perched in a border community filled with secrets and scores to settle with History. Against this backdrop, the narrator endeavors to save a woman encountered by chance on the internet from becoming still another name without a history, another deracinated and disenchanted individual. In prose that is precise and engaging, as though shot through by a sense of pain both silent and inescapable, Pietro Spirito gives shape to an existential thriller in which there are neither guilty parties nor heroes, only victims and survivors.

A fearless descent into the darkest corners of human desire and violence.

First written thirty-five years ago and completed days before the Stonewall riots in New York, award-winning author Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg is one of America’s most famous “unpublishable” novels. It recounts three days in 1969 in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus. Narrated by his young accomplice, Delaney’s novel portrays an exploration of erotic depravity, a capacious landscape of sexuality that transgresses social and erotic boundaries.

While testing readers’ tolerance, what transfigures the novel into a work of literature is Delany’s refusal, faced with moral anxieties and revulsion, to mutilate or disown his creation. Hogg’s characters wear recognizable human faces, possessing intense loyalty, perverse admiration, and a kind of integrity. Hargus fascinates. He is the embodiment of what society can turn people into, the decaying condition of the human soul.
 

A riveting story about parenthood, substance abuse, and the strength it takes to come back from our mistakes

Foster care is a disaster in Rockford, Illinois. Meredith, a social worker and single mom, is stretched beyond thin but determined to protect her kids: not only her son, but those on her caseload too. When the stress of the job has her breaking her sobriety, the foundations of her life begin to tremble. After drinking too much, she makes a mistake that puts her preschooler in jeopardy, and Meredith finds herself in a situation that mirrors her clients’ as she loses custody of her son. In her fight to get him back, Meredith experiences the system from the outside—while still working for the kids inside of it. Set over the course of a year, this riveting documentary-esque novel is told from multiple perspectives, including those of case workers, birth parents, foster parents, and foster children. Written with the working-class humor and heart that defines the Midwest, How We See the Gray is a story about mistakes, second chances, and trying to do better in a system that seems doomed to fail.
 

One October night in the depressed steel town of Lodi, Ohio, two police officers respond to a call about trespassers in the derelict Lodi Steel machine shop. A chase through the crumbling cathedral of steel columns launches a chain of events that will test the officers’ partnership and leave a boy to fend for himself in a decaying Rust Belt neighborhood choked by joblessness, boredom, and addiction.

On the opposite end of town, a young woman steps out of a rust-bucket Grand Marquis into an all-night diner. Instead of luggage, she carries mementos: an ankh tattoo she inked herself and a wallet-sized photograph of a boy who disappeared. She doesn’t realize her ex-boyfriend has hired two brothers to track her down and bring her back, by any means necessary.

The complex female leads of Hungry Town, with its sharp dialogue and poetic sensibility, turn classic noir and cop drama tropes on their heads. These morally complicated characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, sometimes violently, sometimes with surprising compassion.