The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train returns with an ambitious, emotionally resonant novel that captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of a trio of women’s lives in nineteenth-century Australia. Seduced by her employer’s son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced ...
Aug 25, 2020•47 min
It's 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn't ask for more out of life—her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open. As her studies take her all over the city, she is drawn to Greenwich Village's new bo...
Aug 05, 2020•18 min
Elizabeth is tired. Years after coming to New York to try to build a life, she has found herself with two kids, a husband, two jobs, a PhD—and now they’re filing for bankruptcy. As she tries to balance her dream and the impossibility of striving toward it while her work and home lives feel poised to fall apart, she wakes at ungodly hours to run miles by the icy river, struggling to quiet her thoughts. When she reaches out to Sasha, her long-lost childhood friend, it feels almost harmless—one of ...
Jul 30, 2020•1 hr 1 min
This dazzling debut novel for fans of Mrs. Poe and Longbourn explores the scandalous historical love affair between Branwell Brontë and Lydia Robinson, giving voice to the woman who allegedly corrupted her son’s innocent tutor and brought down the entire Brontë family. Yorkshire, 1843: Lydia Robinson—mistress of Thorp Green Hall—has lost her precious young daughter and her mother within the same year. She returns to her bleak home, grief-stricken and unmoored. With her teenage daughters rebellin...
Jul 30, 2020•53 min
Young adult novelist McConaghy (the Chronicles of Kaya series) makes her adult debut with the clunky chronicle of Franny Stone, a troubled woman who follows a flock of endangered Arctic terns on what is believed to be their final migration home. Franny’s mother, who vanished when Franny was seven, warned her that women in their family are unable to resist the urge to wander. While working at a university in Galway, she meets ornithologist Niall Lynch, who immediately declares they’ll spend their...
Jul 22, 2020•37 min
It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s to...
Jul 15, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future. Both epic...
Jul 15, 2020•55 min
A New York Times Editors' Choice, this revelatory debut story collection from O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa honors characters struggling to find their bearings far from home, even as they do the necessary "grunt work of the world." In the title story of Souvankham Thammavongsa's debut collection, a young girl brings a book home from school and asks her father to help her pronounce a tricky word, a simple exchange with unforgettable consequences. Thammavongsa is a master at homing...
Jul 15, 2020•53 min
No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as...
Jul 15, 2020•55 min
Writing with “a sense of wonder that hasn’t prevailed since the days of Heinlein” (Books in Canada), best-novel Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Robert J. Sawyer brings you “a truly science-fictional work of alternate history” (S.M. Stirling). While J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project team struggle to develop the A-bomb, Edward Teller wants something even more devastating: a weapon based on nuclear fusion — the mechanism that powers the sun. But Teller’s research leads to a terrifying di...
Jul 15, 2020•59 min
From the internationally best-selling author of You Should Have Left, Measuring the World, and F, a transfixing retelling of the German myth of Tyll Ulenspiegel: a story about the devastation of war and a beguiling artist’s decision never to die Daniel Kehlmann masterfully weaves the fates of many historical figures into this enchanting work of magical realism and adventure. This account of the seventeenth-century vagabond performer and trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel begins when he’s a scrawny boy g...
Jun 08, 2020•1 hr 6 min
It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He’s been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the fema...
Jun 08, 2020•35 min
Writing with “a sense of wonder that hasn’t prevailed since the days of Heinlein” (Books in Canada), best-novel Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Robert J. Sawyer brings you “a truly science-fictional work of alternate history” (S.M. Stirling). While J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project team struggle to develop the A-bomb, Edward Teller wants something even more devastating: a weapon based on nuclear fusion — the mechanism that powers the sun. But Teller’s research leads to a terrifying di...
Jun 08, 2020•59 min
An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home. Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encount...
May 20, 2020•55 min
Named one of The New York Times' "7 New Books to Watch Out for in April," this revelatory debut story collection from O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa honors characters struggling to find their bearings far from home, even as they do the necessary "grunt work of the world." In the title story of Souvankham Thammavongsa's debut collection, a young girl brings a book home from school and asks her father to help her pronounce a tricky word, a simple exchange with unforgettable conseque...
May 20, 2020•53 min
From the widely acclaimed author of Waiting for Eden: a stirring, timely new novel that unfolds over the course of a single day in Istanbul: the story of an American woman attempting to leave behind her life in Turkey--to leave without her husband. Catherine has been married for many years to Murat, an influential Turkish real estate developer, and they have a young son together, William. But when she decides to leave her marriage and return home to the United States with William and her photogr...
May 20, 2020•1 hr 1 min
A remarkably inventive novel that explores what it means to live a life fully in the moment, even if those moments are out of order. It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints an...
May 02, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Philip Goff, whose latest book, his second, is Galileos Error: Foundations For A New Science of Consciousness, published in November last year by Pantheon. His first book, by the way, was Consciousness And Fundamental Reality He is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University. Galileo’s Error is centered on the idea of panpsychism, a construct, if you will, that consciousness is funda...
May 02, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 by O, the Oprah Magazine, Good Morning America/ABC-TV, Good Housekeeping, Bustle, TIME, Marie Claire and The Millions An extraordinary story set in the first century about a woman who finds her voice and her destiny, from the celebrated number one New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings In her mesmerizing fourth work of fiction, Sue Monk Kidd takes an audacious approach to history and brings her acclaimed narra...
Apr 21, 2020•1 hr
An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a...
Apr 17, 2020•1 hr 28 min
An affecting memoir from the country’s youngest sommelier, tracing her path through the glamorous but famously toxic restaurant world At just twenty-one, the age when most people are starting to drink (well, legally at least), Victoria James became the country’s youngest sommelier at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Even as Victoria was selling bottles worth hundreds and thousands of dollars during the day, passing sommelier certification exams with flying colors, and receiving distinction from al...
Apr 17, 2020•39 min
The bird book for birders and nonbirders alike that will excite and inspire by providing a new and deeper understanding of what common, mostly backyard, birds are doing--and why "Can birds smell?" "Is this the same cardinal that was at my feeder last year?" "Do robins 'hear' worms?" In What It's Like to Be a Bird, David Sibley answers the most frequently asked questions about the birds we see most often. This special, large-format volume is geared as much to nonbirders as it is to the out-and-ou...
Apr 17, 2020•53 min
"In Dark Towers, David Enrich tells the story of how one of the world's mightiest banks careened off the rails, threatening everything from our financial system to our democracy through its reckless entanglement with Donald Trump. Darkly fascinating and yet all too real, it's a tale that will keep you up at night." (John Carreyrou, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author of Bad Blood) A searing exposé of the most scandalous bank in the world, including its shadowy ties to Do...
Apr 01, 2020•45 min
Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work. Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the...
Apr 01, 2020•1 hr 32 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Megan Angelo, author of Followers, her first novel. Megan is another fellow Pennsylvanian. It seems like all authors are now. From Madeline Miller, to Kiley Reid, Liz Moore, Vikram Pall-el-kar, and a bunch more. Then Ann Patchett who writes about my home town of Elkins Park. It’s wonderful. Megan’s writing has appeared in NYT, WSJ, Glamour and Elle. Well worth going to the last two and taking a look at ...
Feb 27, 2020•1 hr
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Megan Angelo, author of Followers, her first novel. Megan is another fellow Pennsylvanian. It seems like all authors are now. From Madeline Miller, to Kiley Reid, Liz Moore, Vikram Pall-el-kar, and a bunch more. Then Ann Patchett who writes about my home town of Elkins Park. It’s wonderful. Megan’s writing has appeared in NYT, WSJ, Glamour and Elle. Well worth going to the last two and taking a look at ...
Feb 27, 2020•1 min
Good Afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Vikram Paralkar author of Night Theater, his second novel the first was Afflictions. Night Theater was published in January by Catapault. Vikram is a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. He treats patients with leukemia and researches the disease and the nature and manner in which normal cells develop and how and why they sometimes turn cancerous. And how a specific type of RNA regulat...
Feb 27, 2020•50 min
Good Afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Vikram Paralkar author of Night Theater, his second novel the first was Afflictions. Night Theater was published in January by Catapault. Vikram is a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. He treats patients with leukemia and researches the disease and the nature and manner in which normal cells develop and how and why they sometimes turn cancerous. And how a specific type of RNA regulat...
Feb 27, 2020•2 min
Good Afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Emily Beyda, author of this, her first novel The Body Double, published last month by Doubleday. Emily has been the author of the popular advise column “Dear Glutton” for the past few years in The Austin Chronicle. Her articles are online at the paper. They are fun to read. Austin natives have a great resource in Emily’s reviews and suggestions. And as I said, The Body Double is her first novel. The Bod...
Feb 27, 2020•33 min
Good Afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Emily Beyda, author of this, her first novel The Body Double, published last month by Doubleday. Emily has been the author of the popular advise column “Dear Glutton” for the past few years in The Austin Chronicle. Her articles are online at the paper. They are fun to read. Austin natives have a great resource in Emily’s reviews and suggestions. And as I said, The Body Double is her first novel. The Bod...
Feb 27, 2020•1 min
