Fiction

Shakespeare in Love meets Shakespeare’s Sister in this novel of England’s first professional female poet and her collaboration and love affair with William Shakespeare. “An exquisite portrait of a Renaissance woman pursuing her artistic destiny in England and Italy, who may—or may not—be Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.” —Margaret George, best-selling author of Elizabeth I

Winner of the Costa First Novel Award

When the remains of a young child are discovered during a winter storm on a stretch of the bleak Lancashire coastline known as the Loney, a man named Smith is forced to confront the terrifying and mysterious events that occurred 40 years earlier when he visited the place as a boy. “It’s not just good, it’s great. An amazing piece of fiction.” —Stephen King

“Fever at Dawn has the sweetness of The Rosie Project and the pathos of The Fault in Our Stars. Better still, it is based on a true story, that of the author’s parents, who found love in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the horrors of World War II. …A book to fall in love with.” —Herald Sun

I love a good road trip story. There is something about being trapped in a vehicle with others that forces us to not only examine who we are as people, but also to confront the complicated threads that bind us to others. In The Wangs vs. the World, Chang explores one family’s tumultuous relationships with both humor and empathy. This is Chang’s debut novel and I am definitely looking forward to more by her. - Karena                                                 

“We continue to love thrillers and especially love this one. In Pittard’s unconventional novel, a couple on a road trip deal with raging storms and their own fraying marriage. Appropriately tense and doomy.” —Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review

Pacific Northwest Book Award Winner & Starred Review from Publishers Weekly

“A faltering journalist returns to an island abandoned after an earthquake released a toxic spill. That’s the beautifully wrought setting of this novel, which reunites two childhood friends, one of whom has joined a sect claiming it can heal the land.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

Cambridge, 1958. Late for class, Eva Edelstein swerves to miss a dog and crashes her bike. Jim Taylor hurries to help her. In that brief moment, three outcomes are born for Eva and Jim. As the strands of their lives weave together and apart across the decades from college through wildly different successes and disappointments, seductions and betrayals, births and funerals, joys and sorrows, the only constant is the power of their connection. 

Protagonist 560-year-old “ancient mariner” Daniel Defoe’s gritty storytelling travels from an unmoored drop-out narrator in present-day Key West, then leaps to an enslaved Pirahao girl in 1560 Granada, then to three other questing youths in the years 2200 and 1750 and in the 2500s, in repeatedly rotating versions of America. There be greed and colonialist corruption along these edges of ruin, but smidgeons of love and grim humor also. Meta-fictional and psycho-economic glimpses of climate disruption are revealed in five diverse epochs.—Steve Lawton

This is an excellent anthology of great current fiction from California, representing our fair state in all of its beautiful and insane glory. Along with writers from many of the far corners of the territory, the book includes several Santa Cruzans, including Elizabeth McKenzie (The Portable Veblen), Micah Perks (What Becomes Us), Kat Meads (2:12 a.m.: Essays), and Gary Young (The Dream of a Moral Life). Sharp, intelligent, and often very funny, these pieces offer something for everyone. - Rico

When a boy is accidentally killed on a North Dakota reservation, the family of the shooter undertakes a drastic attempt at redemption. The fraught but permanent tie between the families sparks questions of trust, loyalty, justice, and memory. As in life, there are no concrete answers, and Erdrich does not attempt to prettify that which life makes messy. Her prose, as ever, is unrelentingly affecting; the agonies, hopes, and longings of these characters become the reader’s own. LaRose traces its characters’ paths as they cross back and forth between old tradition and modernity, the spirit world and tangible experience, reconciliation and grief. - Julia