Luster

One of the Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2020 Vogue, Elle, Time, The New York Times, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vulture, Parade, USA Today, Literary Hub, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, Refinery29, The Rumpus, Book Riot, Thrilllist, Domino, PopSugar, New York Amsterdam News, Bookshop.org “Exacting, hilarious, and deadly . . . A writer of exhilarating freedom and daring.” —Zadie Smith, Harper’s Bazaar "Impossible to put down.” —Ling Ma, author of Severance No one wants what no one wants. And how do we even know what we want? How do we know we’re ready to take it? Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties—sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage—with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren’t hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric’s home—though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows. Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven Leilani’s Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life—her hunger, her anger—in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

Documents how luxury goods have been transformed by a shift from exclusive distribution practices by quality-minded family businesses to mass production by profit-minded big corporations, revealing the secrets of top designers while examining the ways in which today's methods have had a negative impact.

Vivid exploration of what the world of objects reveals about our lives.

In this story for readers of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Man Called Ove, when all seems lost, he finds what matters most. Walter Lavender Jr. is a master of finding. A wearer of high-tops. A maker of croissants. A son keeping vigil, twelve years counting. But he wouldn’t be able to tell you. Silenced by his motor speech disorder, Walter’s life gets lonely. Fortunately, he has The Lavenders—his mother’s enchanted dessert shop, where marzipan dragons breathe actual fire. He also has a knack for tracking down any missing thing—except for his lost father. So when the Book at the root of the bakery’s magic vanishes, Walter, accompanied by his overweight golden retriever, journeys through New York City to find it—along the way encountering an unforgettable cast of lost souls. Steeped in nostalgic wonder, The Luster of Lost Things explores the depths of our capacity for kindness and our ability to heal. A lyrical meditation on why we become lost and how we are found, from the bright, broken heart of a boy who knows where to look for everyone but himself.

As an undercover operative for the Constellation League, Marcos Starlaw’s current assignment is a dangerous mission. Posing as a low-end gem merchant, he must infiltrate the Delta Seven mining colony to discern whether pirates have overrun the planet as his superiors suspect. Still, he expects to return home soon, back into the arms of the many women who eagerly await his return. Burned and scarred by torture, Nova Drayton has lived the past two years in a cave, waiting for someone to help her people. The governor of her home world is a lying, thieving traitor who has taken up with the Limaxian pirates that have overrun her society. They’ve killed many innocents, including her parents and fiancé. Realizing law enforcers may never come—that they’ve likely forgotten their promise to so much as patrol her beleaguered colony—Nova now hates everything having to do with the vaunted Constellation League and its pretentious officers. When Marcos comes face to face with the pirates and a weapon of mass destruction, he makes a critical mistake, blowing his cover. If Nova doesn’t help Marcos escape the pirates … well, he’s already one heartbeat away from taking his last breath. How can he convince a girl who’s lived through hell that he’s the one she’s been waiting for? With nothing left but their own ingenuity, the pair must find a way to ally or die at the hands of cutthroats. Sensuality Level: Sensual

Sure, the little town of Luster, Idaho is isolated, and most of its inhabitants go back for generations, but does that fully explain the unusual camaraderie among its citizens, their high instance of financial success, or, most notably, their acceptance of events that happened years before as current? When an investment deal brings Glenda Prince to Luster, she's quickly engulfed in the generosity of everyone from an elderly farm couple to a cherubic hayseed of a physician and the friendly one-eyed waitress at the Pancake Chalet, but trouble awaits. The young man who had obsessively stalked Glenda years before and she thought she'd left far behind…is now a member of the New Age commune in town, an organization that drives the less spiritual folks in Luster nuts. Glenda has trouble making connections with her local business partner, which forces her to stay in town longer than anticipated long enough to be once again picked up on her stalker's radar, long enough to be caught up in a disaster that affects the whole town, and long enough to meet the reclusive Wanda, an encounter that will change her life and the lives of others.

In this story for readers of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Man Called Ove, when all seems lost, he finds what matters most. Walter Lavender Jr. is a master of finding. A wearer of high-tops. A maker of croissants. A son keeping vigil, twelve years counting. But he wouldn’t be able to tell you. Silenced by his motor speech disorder, Walter’s life gets lonely. Fortunately, he has The Lavenders—his mother’s enchanted dessert shop, where marzipan dragons breathe actual fire. He also has a knack for tracking down any missing thing—except for his lost father. So when the Book at the root of the bakery’s magic vanishes, Walter, accompanied by his overweight golden retriever, journeys through New York City to find it—along the way encountering an unforgettable cast of lost souls. Steeped in nostalgic wonder, The Luster of Lost Things explores the depths of our capacity for kindness and our ability to heal. A lyrical meditation on why we become lost and how we are found, from the bright, broken heart of a boy who knows where to look for everyone but himself.

A New York Times Notable Book The debut novel from the National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment "[This] compact epic of a novel contains perhaps Klay's finest writing yet . . . Using his formidable gifts for scene-setting, meaningful irony and deep human empathy, Klay weaves together a set of stories over the course of nearly three decades . . . Amid raging fires and illness and constitutional crises, Klay's book roars something vital: Never forget about war or the blood and bone and the evil and the reckless idealism of who we all really are." --Los Angeles Times A group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord's safe house on the Venezuelan border. They're watching him with an American-made drone, about to strike using military tactics taught to them by U.S. soldiers who honed their skills to lethal perfection in Iraq. In Missionaries, Phil Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives. For Mason, a U.S. Army Special Forces medic, and Lisette, a foreign correspondent, America's long post-9/11 wars in the Middle East exerted a terrible draw that neither is able to shake. Where can such a person go next? All roads lead to Colombia, where the US has partnered with local government to keep predatory narco gangs at bay. Mason, now a liaison to the Colombian military, is ready for the good war, and Lisette is more than ready to cover it. Juan Pablo, a Colombian officer, must juggle managing the Americans' presence and navigating a viper's nest of factions bidding for power. Meanwhile, Abel, a lieutenant in a local militia, has lost almost everything in the seemingly endless carnage of his home province, where the lines between drug cartels, militias, and the state are semi-permeable. Drawing on six years of research in America and Colombia into the effects of the modern way of war on regular people, Klay has written a novel of extraordinary suspense infused with geopolitical sophistication and storytelling instincts that are second to none. Missionaries is a window not only into modern war, but into the individual lives that go on long after the drones have left the skies.

Do you really value the objects around you or are they just "things" to you? The premise of this book is that part of the pleasure of life-contentment that we can cultivate no matter how much or how little we have-comes from the conscious appreciation of the beauty and the significance of everyday things. Through photographs and poems, the author takes you on a voyage of discovery through the world around you. You are shown, sometimes playfully and sometimes profoundly, that even the simplest of things-a shirt and tie, a kitchen colander, a closed door, or a blue butterfly-can have a shining beauty, secret story, and surprising meaning. Along the way, you are gently reminded that such objects deserve to be "warmed with much handling" and gazed upon with pleasure and gratitude as the tiny treasures they are.

An intimately charged novel of desire and disaster from the National Book Award-winning author of Trust Exercise and A Person of Interest Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife. My Education is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.

A new classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping. The long-awaited fourth and last of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead novels--one of the great works of contemporary literature. With Jack, Robinson takes her readers back to the small town of Gilead, Iowa, in 1956, to tell the story of John Ames Boughton, the godson of John Ames and the black sheep of his family. He's a ne-er do well and the beloved prodigal son who falls in love with and marries Della, a beautiful and brilliant African-American teacher he meets in segregated St. Louis. Their fraught, beautiful romance is one of Robinson's greatest achievements.

"You can take a leap, do something off the wall, something reckless. It's your last chance, and most people miss it." South London, 2008. Two couples find themselves at a moment of reckoning, on the brink of acceptance or revolution. Melissa has a new baby and doesn't want to let it change her but, in the crooked walls of a narrow Victorian terrace, she begins to disappear. Michael, growing daily more accustomed to his commute, still loves Melissa but can't quite get close enough to her to stay faithful. Meanwhile out in the suburbs, Stephanie is happy with Damian and their three children, but the death of Damian's father has thrown him into crisis—or is it something, or some-one, else? Are they all just in the wrong place? Are any of them prepared to take the leap? Set against the backdrop of Barack Obama's historic election victory, Ordinary People is an intimate, immersive study of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, friendship and ageing, and the fragile architecture of love. With its distinctive prose and irresistible soundtrack, it is the story of our lives, and those moments that threaten to unravel us.