New Releases: September Edition

Did one of the book covers on our homepage catch your eye? They are all new titles being released in September 2021, and all are well-reviewed and anticipated. You can watch the video or read the description of each below, then click the linked title to request a copy or get your name on the wait list. And don't forget to watch for more featured releases next month!

Featured Fiction for September

Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian
Chloe is a freshman, a legging-wearing hot girl next door, who also happens to be a psychopath. She spends her time on yogalates, frat parties and plotting to kill Will Bachman, a childhood friend who wronged her. Chloe is one of seven students at her college who are part of a clinical study of psychopaths—students like herself who lack empathy and can’t comprehend emotions. The study requires them to wear smart watches that track their moods and movements. When one of the students in the study is found murdered, a game of cat and mouse begins, and Chloe goes from hunter to prey. 

House of Ashes by Stuart Neville
Sara's husband has uprooted them from England and moved them to his native Northern Ireland for a “fresh start” after her nervous breakdown. Sara, who knows no one in Northern Ireland, is jobless, carless, and friendless. When a blood-soaked woman beats on the door, insisting the house is hers before being bundled back to her care facility, Sara begins to understand the house has a terrible history her husband never intended for her to discover. As the two women form a bond over their shared traumas, Sara finds the strength to stand up to her abuser, and Mary—silent for six decades—is finally ready to tell her story.

Harrow by Joy Williams
Khristen, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died and came back to life. After Khristen’s boarding school closes, and she discovers her mother has disappeared, she travels across a dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on a putrid lake the elderly residents call “Big Girl.” In a honeycomb of rooms, they plot to punish corporations and people they consider guilty for the destruction of nature. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “seditious lot with kamikaze hearts, an army of aged, determined to refresh, through violence, a plundered earth”?

Featured Nonfiction for September

Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery by Andrés Reséndez
It began with a secret mission. Spain, plotting to break Portugal’s trade with the Orient, set sail from Mexico to cross the Pacific—and then try a never-before-accomplished return. Four ships set out, each with a team of navigators. The smallest ship, guided by Lope Martín, a mulatto who was one of the most qualified pilots, pulled ahead and became lost from the fleet. So began an epic voyage, featuring mutiny, murderous islanders, physical hardships—and at last a return to the New World. But the pilot of the fleet’s flagship, the friar Andrés de Urdaneta, later achieved a return, too. It was he who basked in glory, while Martín was sentenced to be hanged. Here, historian Reséndez sets the record straight.

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach
What to do about a jaywalking moose? A bear breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Roach follows animal-attack investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, and "danger tree" faller blasters. She travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Himalaya to St. Peter’s Square before the pope arrives for mass, when vandal gulls destroy the floral display. She taste-tests rat bait and gets mugged by a macaque. Combining forensic science and conservation genetics with laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals much about humanity and nature. When it comes to "problem" wildlife, she finds, humans are often the problem—and the solution. 

Beautiful Country: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang
In Chinese, the word for America means “beautiful country.” Yet when Qian arrives in New York City in 1994, she finds fear and scarcity. In China, her parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal" and her parents work in sweatshops. Shunned at school, Qian goes to the library and learns English through books. She relishes delight when she finds it: her first greasy pizza, “shopping days” when she finds treasures in the trash on Brooklyn’s streets, and a Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center. But then Qian’s Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness she has kept secret. Qian holds onto her father's refrain: Whatever happens, say you were born here, you’ve always lived here. This is an American story about a family breaking under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows.