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Winner of the Barnes and Noble Discovery Prize

Winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction

A New York Times Notable Book

In the insular Portuguese fishing community of Provincetown, Josie Carvalho’s life has been shaped by the annual influx of summer tourists and his great aunt’s fervent, if idiosyncratic, Catholicism. The counterweight to these forces has always been Josie’s relationship with his grandfather John Joseph, a drunk, clam-poaching old man who is nevertheless a sly and masterful storyteller.

After a stranger starts dating Josie’s mother and upsets the family’s equilibrium, John Joseph heals the rift with the colorful and adventurous stories of their ancestor, Francisco Carvalho, a Portuguese explorer who just may have beaten Columbus to the New World. With the guidance of these obscure but inspired tales, Josie begins to find new ways of understanding his family and the outside world. This new edition of Leaving Pico makes Frank X. Gaspar’s award-winning coming-of-age novel accessible to a new generation of readers.

In this powerful debut collection, present-day women of the South Asian diaspora grapple with belonging and are haunted by intergenerational inheritances. Meghana Mysore, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, spins her stories around narrators struggling to assimilate into the surreal world around them. At times, this disorientation skews speculative, where deceased mothers reappear as chiding, broken-down cars. At turns absurd and darkly humorous, the women in Mysore’s stories all experience transformation, be it small or monumental, where they find spaces of freedom and delight within their circumstances.

A kaleidoscopic novel-in-stories set at a fictional Midwest college

Two centuries old and covered in ivy, Wisconsin’s Buchanan College is populated by an eclectic mix of students, staff, and professors hailing from the nearby suburbs to the far corners of the globe. From the outside, Buchanan seems an idyllic world of higher learning. Yet behind its bucolic exterior, a series of interconnected dramas play out: a slew of first-year students mysteriously disappear within days of moving in; an injured hockey star discovers an unlikely fountain of youth; an alumna returns to campus after fifty years in the hope of reconnecting with a former love. And throughout the novel we follow the story of Jenny Ramirez, a social worker and the wife of a popular professor, who commits an act that alters how the college sees her, and how she sees herself. Over a span of four years, from orientation to graduation, the characters in Liberal Arts are forced to weigh their ideals and aspirations against the harsh and often ridiculous realities of the world, and are left asking what, if anything, a liberal arts education has left to teach them.

A pivotal summer in the life of Maria Branwell, the mother of the Brontë sisters

In imagined diary entries from the summer of 1812, twenty-nine-year-old Maria Branwell is pondering a momentous choice. Far from her Cornish home, working with her aunt and uncle at their Methodist boys’ school on the moors of Yorkshire, she has just been introduced to the Irish clergyman Patrick Brontë. The two are powerfully drawn to one another, resulting in a proposal Maria accepts wholeheartedly—yet reservations begin to surface. From her earliest years she has felt marked by an uncommon destiny, one she had assumed incompatible with an ordinary life of marriage and children. Does marriage fit into that destiny? Or is there a different path to take? The choice of this woman forgotten by history will alter the course of literature forever.