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In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett?an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion."With wit and dry humor...quietly affecting in unexpected ways. Chambers' language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details."--The New York TimesLONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It's a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape.That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen's gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life.Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives...with unimaginable consequences.Both a mystery and a love story, Small Pleasures is a literary tour-de-force in the style of The Remains of the Day, about conflict between personal fulfillment and duty; a novel that celebrates the beauty and potential for joy in all things plain and unfashionable.

Discover the hidden world of the fox, as beautifully revealed by an acclaimed ecologist who has studied foxes for two decades across four continents ?An ode to this familiar yet mysterious creature. ... The sight of foxes can lift Brand's prose into poetry. ... By turns lyrical, salty, funny and scholarly.? ?New York Times Book ReviewThe fox. For thousands of years myth and folklore have celebrated its cunning intelligence. Today the red fox is the nature's most populous carnivore, its dancing orange tail a common sight in backyards. Yet who is this wild neighbor, truly? How do we negotiate this uneasy new chapter of an ancient relationship? Join British ecologist Adele Brand on a journey to discover the surprising secrets of the fabled fox, the familiar yet enigmatic creature that has adapted to the human world with astonishing?some say, unsettling?success.Brand has studied foxes for twenty years across four continents?from the Yucatán rainforest to India's remote Thar Desert, from subarctic Canada to metropolitan London. Her observations have convinced her that the fox is arguably the most modern of all wildlife, uniquely suited to survival in the rapidly expanding urban/wild interface. Blending cutting-edge science, cultural anthropology, and intimate personal storytelling drawn from her own remarkable fieldwork, The Hidden World of the Fox is Brand's rich and revelatory portrait of the extraordinary animal she has devoted her life to understanding.

A warm, funny, and whip-smart debut novel about rebellious youth, inconceivable motherhood, and the complications of belonging to a city, a culture, and a family—when none of them can quite contain who you really areAll of us were refugees of the nuclear family . . .T wenty-three-year-old artist Andrea Morales has escaped her Midwestern Catholic childhood—and the closet—to create a home and life for herself within the thriving but insular lesbian underground of Portland, Oregon. But one drunken night, reeling from a bad breakup and a friend’s betrayal, she recklessly crosses enemy lines and hooks up with a man. To her utter shock, Andrea soon discovers she’s pregnant—and despite the concerns of her astonished circle of gay friends, she decides to have the baby.A decade later, when her precocious daughter, Lucia, starts asking questions about the father she’s never known, Andrea is forced to reconcile the past she hoped to leave behind with the life she’s worked so hard to build.A thoroughly modern and original antiromantic comedy, Stray City is an unabashedly entertaining literary debut about the families we’re born into and the families we choose, about finding yourself by breaking the rules and making bad decisions for all the right reasons.

?A knockout short story collection...Each one of these 10 dizzyingly immersive stories offers up a heady and visceral portrait of what ails us, from isolation and self-doubt, to unrequited love and regret over what might have been, to what it means to be (and to be considered) an American." -- San Francisco ChronicleMeng Jin's critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as ?spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), ?powerful? (Washington Post), and ?meticulously observed, daringly imagined? (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories.Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly endless access to knowledge, and little actual power.Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who ?reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it? (Paris Review).

Published to ravishing acclaim in the UK, a fierce and suspenseful reimagining of Homer's Iliad set in mid-1990s Northern Ireland?a heart pounding tale of honor and revenge that ?explodes with verbal invention, rapid juxtaposition, brutality and fun? (Times Literary Supplement).Northern Ireland, 1996.After twenty-five years of vicious conflict, the IRA and the British have agreed to an uneasy ceasefire as a first step towards lasting peace. But, faced with the prospect that decades of savage violence and loss have led only to smiles and handshakes, those on the ground in the border country question whether it really is time to pull back?or quite the opposite.When an IRA man's wife turns informer, he and his brother gather their comrades for an assault on the local army base. But old grudges boil over, and the squad's feared sniper, Achill, refuses to risk his life to defend another man's pride. As the gang plots without him, the British SAS are sent to crush the rogue terror cell before it can wreck the fragile truce and drag the region back to the darkest days of the Troubles. Meanwhile, Achill's young protégé grabs his chance to join the fray in his place...Inspired by the oldest war story of them all, Michael Hughes's virtuoso novel explores the brutal glory of armed conflict, the cost of Ireland's most uncivil war, and the bitter tragedy of those on both sides who offer their lives to defend the dream of country.

The incredible true story of a Polish resistance fighter’s infiltration of Auschwitz to sabotage the camp from within, and his death-defying attempt to warn the Allies about the Nazis’ plans for a “Final Solution” before it was too lateTo uncover the fate of the thousands being interred at a mysterious Nazi camp on the border of the Reich, a thirty-nine-year-old Polish resistance fighter named Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: assume a fake identity, intentionally get captured and sent to the new camp, and then report back to the underground on what had happened to his compatriots there. But gathering information was not his only task: he was to execute an attack from inside—where the Germans would least expect it. The name of the camp was Auschwitz.Over the next two and half years, Pilecki forged an underground army within Auschwitz that sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi informants and officers, and amassed evidence of shocking abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying truth that the camp was to become the epicenter of Nazi plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life, and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so meant attempting the impossible—an escape from Auschwitz itself.Completely erased from the historical record by Poland’s postwar Communist government, Pilecki remains almost unknown to the world. Now, with exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files, Jack Fairweather offers an unflinching portrayal of survival, revenge, and betrayal in mankind’s darkest hour. And in uncovering the tragic outcome of Pilecki’s mission, he reveals that its ultimate defeat originated not in Auschwitz or Berlin, but in London and Washington.

In the tradition of Killers of the Flower Moon, a haunting murder mystery revealing the human story behind one of the most devastating crimes of our time: the ruthless destruction of the Amazon rain forest?and anyone who stands in the wayDeep in the heart of the Amazon, the city of Rondon do Pará, Brazil, lived for decades in the shadow of land barons, or fazendeiros, who maintained control of the region through unscrupulous land grabs and egregious human rights violations. They razed and burned the jungle, expelled small-scale farmers and Indigenous tribes from their lands, and treated their farmhands as slaves?all with impunity. The only true opposition came from Rondon's small but robust farmworkers' union, led by the charismatic Dezinho, who fought to put power back into the hands of the people who called the Amazon home. But when Dezinho was assassinated in cold blood, it seemed the farmworkers' struggle had come to a violent and fruitless end.What no one anticipated was that this event would bring forth an unlikely hero: Dezinho's widow. Against great odds, and at extreme personal risk, Maria Joel, now a single mother of four young children, used her ingenuity and unwavering support from union members to bring her husband's killer to account in court. Her campaign gained unexpected momentum, helping to bring international attention to the dire situation in Rondon, from Brazil's president Lula to international celebrities and civil rights groups.Maria Joel's fight for justice had far-reaching implications: it unearthed a chilling world of corruption and lawlessness rooted in Brazil's quest to turn the largest rain forest on earth into an economic frontier. As more details came out, it began to look increasingly likely that Dezinho's killer, a reluctant and inexperienced gunman, was just one piece of a larger criminal consortium, with ties leading all the way up to one of the region's most powerful and notorious fazendeiros of all.Featuring groundbreaking revelations and exclusive interviews, this gripping work of narrative nonfiction is the culmination of journalist Heriberto Araujo's years-long investigation in the heart of the Amazon. Set against the backdrop of appalling deforestation rates and resultant superfires, Masters of the Lost Land vividly reveals the human story behind the loss of?and fierce crusade to protect?one of our greatest resources in the fight against climate change and one of the last wild places on earth.

In 1994, a wildfire on Colorado's Storm King Mountain was wrongly identified at the outset as occurring in South Canyon. This unintentional, seemingly minor human error was merely the first in a string of mistakes that would be compounded into one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. Before it was done, fourteen courageous firefighters--men and women, hotshots, smokejumpers, and helicopter crew--would lose their lives battling the deadly, so-called South Canyon blaze. John N. Maclean's award-winning national bestseller Fire on the Mountain is a stunning reconstruction of the killer conflagration and its aftermath.