Two little girls stand with their heads bowed in my living room. I’m told they’re my granddaughters. Daisy is nine, and Alice seven. Daisy is the spitting image of her mother. This is the first time I’ve met them since my daughter and I fell out after she married that waste of space, Vince. They’ve come to live with me because their mother — my daughter — was murdered. In her own home while they slept close by. I think Vince killed her. But the police can’t prove it. I’ve always known he was no good. He treated my daughter like dirt. I said he’d cheat on her — but she wouldn’t listen.

Who is Audrey Hoedemaker? It's a question her sister Maureen has heard more times than she can count, and she doesn't know what the short answer would be. Little sister, troubled teen, backpacker, musical theatre coach, con artist, childcare worker. Murderer. A tragic, traumatic childhood casts a long shadow on the Hoedemaker sisters. Maureen has worked hard to move beyond the violence of the past and build a good, honest life for herself. Audrey, however, just can't seem to do the same, careening from one state of chaos to another.

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.

The 13 chapters of The Art of War, each devoted to one aspect of warfare, were compiled by the high-ranking Chinese military general, strategist, and philosopher Sun-Tzu. In spite of its battlefield specificity, The Art of War has found new life in the modern age, with leaders in fields as wide and far-reaching as world politics, human psychology, and corporate strategy finding valuable insight in its timeworn words.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

New York City, late September 2001. The walls of the city are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. When a letter arrives from an aunt she didn’t know existed in Ireland with the offer of a new life, the name jogs a memory: an old videocassette game Cora used to play as a child where two sisters must save the students of a mysterious boarding school.

From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales. In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas's hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father's pumpkin patch. At once humourous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.

When Mae and Ari meet outside a crowded gay bar during their final year of university, their connection is instant, sparking a lifetime friendship. Stubborn and no stranger to breaking hearts, Mae needs Ari's bright light to guide her out of her self-centered ways. Reeling from a scandal in New York, vibrant, charming Ari sees Mae as an anchor keeping him grounded. Though they are young, ambitious, and queer, both Mae and Ari secretly daydream about settling down somewhere with a garden, children, and dogs, building a life that feels like home.

Paris's path is clear, his future settled. He's trained his whole life in politics and the running of a kingdom. He's going to be an adviser to the future king, his beloved prince. But when his father dies unexpectedly, the current king takes the opportunity to get rid of him, sending him to the barbaric southern tribe lands of Nemeda as a diplomat. No one has ever returned from the tribes alive.

Maya's final year at university is off to a rocky start. Between pining for her straight best friend, trying to revitalize her football team after another year of defeat, and dealing with her own family problems, she's already overwhelmed. When her arch-rival, Jamie Mellor, joins the football squad, it threatens to push her over the edge. Not only is it the last chance to prove her worth as captain, Maya must now find a way to play alongside this annoying loudmouth without losing her mind every five minutes.

Hello Stranger is a book about chance encounters—at a bar, through social media, in a bathhouse—and what a stranger can reveal about who we are and who we could still yet be. A stranger, after all, is a site of endless possibilities. As Manuel Betancourt looks back on his past relationships, he turns to characters and narratives that helped him question notions of what monogamy and coupledom (and relationships and marriage) can and should look like.

Proposing to my first boyfriend at a hockey game wasn’t my smartest move. Not only does said boyfriend walk out on me, but the whole stupid thing goes viral, and it turns out the man I was dating has too many boyfriends to count. Internet fame has crowned me a member of the Jilted Exes’ Club, a name I’d do anything to escape. One thing’s for sure: I’m not making the same mistake again. No more boyfriends, just easy hookups. And I’ll start with this gorgeous catch in Seattle. The only problem…he’s a god in bed, and I’m an inexperienced mess.

Structured around nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue, Uketsu invites listeners to piece together the mystery behind each and the over-arching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the internationally bestselling debut from mystery horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.

At least that's what I tell myself when I witness the same hot guy commit mass murder three times in a few days. I'm either the luckiest mute boy ever or possibly the unluckiest. Who knows, maybe him kidnapping me will turn into the greatest love story ever told? Hey, it could happen! You never know how these things will turn out. I happen to believe in love and soulmates, and if nothing else, Arlington Fox doesn't treat my disability like a nuisance.

In this exhilarating tale by New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor, a disabled Nigerian American woman pens a wildly successful Sci-Fi novel, but as her fame rises, she loses control of the narrative—a surprisingly cutting, yet heartfelt drama about art and love, identity and connection, and, ultimately, what makes us human. This is a story unlike anything you’ve seen before.

I don't ask for much from life; I get paid, and then I get laid. And piloting spaceships across the galaxy keeps my solo lifestyle well-funded. I don't need a relationship or any of the baggage that comes with it. I like my men like I like my coffee; to go. That is, until the most boring job in the universe goes horribly wrong and I'm snatched from my ship by a seven-foot alien. He's huge, he's purple, and he's ripped as hell. I'm sure I'm a dead man. Only it turns out he doesn't want to kill me. What he wants is far worse.

For centuries, vampires freely roamed the land until the Grays came out of nowhere, wiping out half the population in a night. The survivors fled to the last vampire city of First Light, where the rules are simple. If you’re poor, you drink weak blood. If you’re nobility, you get the good stuff. And you can never, ever leave. Palace maid Sam has had enough of these rules, and she’s definitely had enough of cleaning the bedpans of the lords who enforce them. When the son of the city’s ruler is murdered, she seizes the chance to blackmail her way into a better class and better blood.

Tru has been hiding all her life. Her parents taught her to conceal her bastion Talent: indestructible skin, muscles, and bones. In a world where Talents are common and varied, no one trusts a bastion—they’re too powerful. Hiding failed to keep Tru’s parents alive, but moments before their murder, Tru’s mom pointed her to Logan Dire, a famed recluse assassin who adopted and trained orphaned Tru. At seventeen, she’s still hiding. Not even her closest friends know her true name or Talent, or that she’s balancing high school with knife and stealth training.

Alice loves a good list. But careful planning didn’t stop her from losing her job and her fiance in one fell swoop. With her dreaded 30th birthday looming on the horizon, Alice makes the first impulsive decision of her life—booking a flight to the UK for a three-week, all-female, literary bus tour. What could possibly go wrong? Turns out—everything.