When Jan Blake and Elaine Cook arrive at Lancaster Community Church to prepare for the Mother Daughter Tea, they discover that the historic white clapboard building has been broken into. Have the cousins stumbled on to yet another mystery? At first, it appears that nothing was taken, but it soon becomes clear that something valuable—dating back to the very founding of Maine and part of Pastor Mike’s family history—is gone. And then another unusual item, far less valuable, is discovered missing too. Who ransacked the church and took these things? The plot thickens as red herrings sidetrack the sleuthing cousins from their pursuit of clues and, as is often the case when there’s trouble brewing in Lancaster, the truth is more surprising and complex than they could imagine. Meanwhile, Elaine’s daughter arrives for a visit from Colorado, and the cousins’ latest flea market find might very well bring with it a mystery of its own.

At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat has become one of our most celebrated new writers. She is an artist who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti–and the enduring strength of Haiti’s women–with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people’s suffering and courage.

When Haitians tell a story, they say “Krik?” and the eager listeners answer “Krak!” In Krik? Krak! Danticat establishes herself as the latest heir to that narrative tradition with nine stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. They tell of women who continue loving behind prison walls and in the face of unfathomable loss; of a people who resist the brutality of their rulers through the powers of imagination. The result is a collection that outrages, saddens, and transports the reader with its sheer beauty.

The first book in Louise Erdrich’s highly acclaimed “Native American” trilogy that includes “The Beet Queen,” “Tracks,” and “The Bingo Palace,” re-sequenced and expanded to include never-before-published chapters.

Set on and around a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Love Medicine is the epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines.

With astonishing virtuosity, each chapter draws on a range of voices to limn its tales. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of life.

Filled with humor, magic, injustice and betrayal, Erdrich blends family love and loyalty in a stunning work of dramatic fiction.

Hailed in the Washington Post as one of our most important writers in English, Jeanette Winterson has firmly established her reputation as an extraordinarily daring and original novelist. In Gut Symmetries, lives and universes run parallel in a complex contemporary love story set in New York and Liverpool, and aboard the QE2

What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren’t bound to by blood? What happens when the person you promise to love and to honor for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In Truth & Beauty, her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Ann Patchett shines a fresh, revealing light on the world of women’s friendships and shows us what it means to stand together.
Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work was. In her critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir,Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, the years of chemotherapy and radiation, and then the endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn’t Lucy’s life or Ann’s life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long, cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this book shows us what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined.

This is a tender, brutal book about loving a person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and about being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.