HPL 2023 Books You May Have Missed

"An interior designer learns to rebuild her love life from the ground up with zero blueprints in this new romantic comedy by Ashley Herring Blake, author of Delilah Green Doesn't Care. For Astrid Parker, failure is unacceptable. Ever since she broke up with her fiancé a year ago, she's been focused on her career-her friends might say she's obsessed, but she's just driven. When Pru Everwood asks her to be the designer for the Everwood Inn's renovation...

"1863: In a small Creole cottage in New Orleans, an ingenious young Black woman named Stella embroiders intricate maps on repurposed cloth to help enslaved men flee and join the Union Army. Bound to a man who would kill her if he knew of her clandestine activities, Stella has to hide not only her efforts but her love for William, a Black soldier and a brilliant musician. Meanwhile, in New York City, a Jewish woman stitches a quilt for her husband,...

"Night after night, Mackenzie's dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina's untimely death- a weekend at the family's lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too - crows stalk her every move around the city; she gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina - Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone. Travelling north to her rural hometown...

"Twelve months after her younger sister Anahita's death, Mitra Jahani reluctantly returns to her parents' home in suburban New Jersey to observe the Iranian custom of "The One Year." Ana is always in Mitra's heart, though they chose very different paths. While Ana, sweet and dutiful, bowed to their domineering father's demands and married, Mitra rebelled, and was banished. Caught in the middle is their mother, Shireen, torn between her fierce love...

"The Secret History meets Ninth House in this sinister, atmospheric novel following a circle of researchers as they uncover a mysterious deck of tarot cards and shocking secrets in New York's famed Met Cloisters. When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for...

"This is the age of vice, where money, pleasure, and power are everything, and the family ties that bind can also kill. New Delhi, 3 a.m. A speeding Mercedes jumps the curb and in the blink of an eye, five people are dead. It's a rich man's car, but when the dust settles there is no rich man at all, just a shell-shocked servant who cannot explain the strange series of events that led to this crime. Nor can he foresee the dark drama that is about to...

"A Hindu perfumer and a Muslim calligrapher fall in love against the backdrop of Partition. On a January morning in 1938, Samir Vij first locks eyes with Firdaus Khan through the rows of perfume bottles in his family's ittar shop in Lahore. Over the years that follow, the perfumer's apprentice and calligrapher's apprentice fall in love with their ancient crafts and with each other, dreaming of the life they will one day share. But as the struggle...

"Winner of a 2020 MacArthur "genius" award for fiction that "interrogates culturally constructed notions of language, memory, and gender from a transnational perspective," Cristina Rivera Garza is a singular voice in contemporary letters, one who American readers are still discovering. New and Selected Stories brings together in English translation stories from across her career, including new writing not yet published in Spanish. It is a unique and...

"Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the Earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language." As she searches...

A lyrical, moving novel in the spirit of Transcendent Kingdom and A Burning--and the most awarded debut title in South Africa--that tells the story of a multiracial family when the Immorality Act is passed, revealing the story of one family's scattered souls in the wake of history. In 1927, South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between "Europeans" (White people) and "natives" (Black people). Those who break the draconian...