In San Francisco in 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman. To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of seventeen, she begins to publish pulp fiction using a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds can no longer satisfy her sense of adventure, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at The Daily Examiner to hire her.

As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated” in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system” by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable.

Informed by real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen’s novel gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to one another, and to ourselves, after tragedy.

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak.

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what. Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere. One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears. Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods.

The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.

Tony Malik, a half-Irish, half-Arab FBI agent based in New York, specializes in tracking money from drug and arms deals. His life takes a dramatic turn when a long-term relationship ends and his job hangs in the balance. Amid personal turmoil, Malik becomes intrigued by his Palestinian father's past. He decides to visit his ancestral homeland for his niece's wedding, accepting a seemingly simple FBI assignment along the way.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.