Alexandria Bellefleur
Count Your Lucky Stars
Harper Collins, 2022
Margot Cooper doesn’t do relationships. She tried and it blew up in her face, so she’ll stick with casual hookups, thank you very much. But now her entire crew has found "the one" and she’s beginning to feel like a fifth wheel. And then fate (the heartless bitch) intervenes. While touring a wedding venue with her engaged friends, Margot comes face-to-face with Olivia Grant—her childhood friend, her first love, her first... well, everything. It’s been ten years, but the moment they lock eyes, Margot’s cold, dead heart thumps in her chest.
Olivia must be hallucinating. In the decade since she last saw Margot, her life hasn’t gone exactly as planned. At almost thirty, she’s been married... and divorced. However, a wedding planner job in Seattle means a fresh start and a chance to follow her dreams. Never in a million years did she expect her important new client’s Best Woman would be the one that got away.
When a series of unfortunate events leaves Olivia without a place to stay, Margot offers up her spare room because she’s a Very Good Person. Obviously. It has nothing to do with the fact that Olivia is as beautiful as ever and the sparks between them still make Margot tingle. As they spend time in close quarters, Margot starts to question her no-strings stance. Olivia is everything she’s ever wanted, but Margot let her in once and it ended in disaster. Will history repeat itself or should she count her lucky stars that she gets a second chance with her first love
About the Author
Alexandria Bellefleur is an author of swoony contemporary romance often featuring loveable grumps and the sunshine characters who bring them to their knees. A Pacific Northwesterner at heart, Alexandria has a weakness for good coffee, Pike Place IPA, and Voodoo Doughnuts. Her special skills include finding the best Pad Thai in every city she visits, remembering faces but not names, falling asleep in movie theaters, and keeping cool while reading smutty books in public. She was a 2018 Romance Writers of America Golden Heart finalist.
J. A. Baker
The Peregrine
Harper Collins, 2017 (originally published 1967)
Reissue of J. A. Baker’s extraordinary classic of British nature writing, with an exclusive new afterword by Robert Macfarlane.
J. A. Baker’s extraordinary classic of British nature writing was first published in 1967. Greeted with acclaim, it went on to win the Duff Cooper Prize, the pre-eminent literary prize of the time. Luminaries such as Ted Hughes, Barry Lopez and Andrew Motion have cited it as one of the most important books in twentieth-century nature writing.
Despite the association of peregrines with the wild, outer reaches of the British Isles, The Peregrine is set on the flat marshes of the Essex coast, where J. A. Baker spent long winters looking and writing about the visitors from the uplands – peregrines that spend the winter hunting the huge flocks of pigeons and waders that share the desolate landscape with them.
This new edition of the timeless classic, published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its first publication, features an afterword by one of the book’s greatest admirers, Robert Macfarlane.
About the Author
John Alec Baker (6 August 1926 – 26 December 1987) was an English author, best known for The Peregrine, which won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1967.
R.F. Kuang
The Dragon Republic
Harper Collins, 2020
The searing follow-up to 2018’s most celebrated fantasy debut, The Poppy War
Rin is on the run …
Haunted by the terrible choices she had to make to save her people, Rin's only reason for living is to take revenge on the traitorous Empress who sold her homeland to its enemies.
Forced to ally with the powerful Dragon Warlord in his plan to unseat the Empress, Rin throws herself into the struggle using the fearsome power bestowed on her by the vengeful god Phoenix
After all, making war is all she knows how to do …
About the Author
Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature.
Suneeta Peres da Costa
Saudade
“Saudade will leave you feeling lost and homesick for a place of your own. Peres Da Costa paints a vivid picture of a young girl’s internal world and shows us how precarious, damaging and lonely an othered existence can be. Saudade is a beautifully written, enlightening read.”
Giramondo Publishing, 2018
A coming-of-age story set in Angola in the period leading up to the colony’s independence, Saudade focuses on a Goan immigrant family caught between complicity in Portuguese rule, and their dependence on the Angolans who are their servants. The title speaks to the melancholy longing for homeland that haunts the characters, and especially the young girl who is the book’s protagonist and narrator.
Suneeta Peres da Costa’s novella captures with intense lyricism the difficult relationship between the girl and her mother, and the ways in which their intimate world is shaken by domestic violence, the legacies of slavery and the end of empire. Her intellectual awakening unfolds into a growing awareness of the lies of colonialism, and the violent political ruptures that ultimately lead to her father’s death, and their exile.
About the Author
Suneeta Peres da Costa was born in Sydney, on Gadigal land of the Eora, and is of Goan heritage. She writes fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry. Her books include the novella Saudade (shortlisted for the 2019 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature), The Prodigal, and Homework. Her honours include fellowships and residencies from Asialink Arts, the Australia Council for the Arts, Varuna, MacDowell, the Yaddo Corporation and the Fulbright Program. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, New York.
Firuzeh Shokooh Valle
In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure
Stanford University Press, 2023
Including women in the global South as users, producers, consumers, designers, and developers of technology has become a mantra against inequality, prompting movements to train individuals in information and communication technologies and foster the participation and retention of women in science and technology fields. In this book, Firuzeh Shokooh Valle argues that these efforts have given rise to an idealized, female economic figure that combines technological dexterity and keen entrepreneurial instinct with gendered stereotypes of care and selflessness. Narratives about the "equalizing" potential of digital technologies spotlight these women's capacity to overcome inequality using said technologies, ignoring the barriers and circumstances that create such inequality in the first place as well as the potentially violent role of technology in their lives. In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure examines how women in the Global South experience and resist the coopting and depoliticizing nature of these scripts. Drawing on fieldwork in Costa Rica and a transnational feminist digital organization, Shokooh Valle explores the ways that feminist activists, using digital technologies as well as a collective politics that prioritize solidarity and pleasure, advance a new feminist technopolitics.
About the Author
Firuzeh Shokooh Valle is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Franklin and Marshall College. Previously, she was a journalist in Puerto Rico covering violence against women, the LGBTQI+ community, migration, racism, and social movements, and earned numerous national awards for her investigative work.