Fiction

Stella Greene and Wesley Clarke are Gene Connolly Memorial High School's biggest rivals. While the two have been battling it out for top student, it's a race to the bottom when it comes to snide comments and pulling the dirtiest prank. For years, Stella and Wes have been the villain in each other's story, and now it's all-out war.

And there is no bigger battle than the one for valedictorian, and more specifically, the coveted valedictorian scholarship.

Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison's body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men, employees at the resort, are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. It turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only sad return home to broken lives.

Bill Clegg returns with a deeply moving, emotionally resonant novel about the complicated bonds and breaking points of female friendship, the corrosive forces of secrets, the heartbeat of longing, and the redemption found in forgiveness.

Franny Stone cannot be contained. In a bleak near-future, she is a wanderer and a sleepwalker, a swimmer and a bird lover. Born in Australia, raised in Ireland by her mother while knowing nothing of her father, she ends up back in Australia with her paternal grandmother. Returning as an adult to Ireland, she works as a cleaner at a university, where Niall Lynch, a famous professor of ornithology, willingly succumbs to her dangerous bewitchment. Their shared ardor for the wild turns tragic as the sixth extinction accelerates.

Early one morning, Congressman Alexander Paine Wilson is planning his reelection campaign when a mysterious delivery arrives at his townhouse. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark. What does it mean? The story hurtles between present day Washington, DC, where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England, where listeners meet the aardvark's taxidermist and the naturalist who hunted her, and learn the secret that binds them all.

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the skies break into a sudden and reckless storm. All forty of the village’s men were at sea, including Maren’s father and brother, and all forty are drowned in the otherworldly disaster.  
 

Petty’s innovative, genre-busting debut opens with a vignette set in Barcelona, in which an unnamed narrator addresses another unnamed character, telling her she’s sorry for standing her up. From there, the novel rockets through metafictional sections—a script for a horror movie, a first-person narrative, a set of revisions for a college essay, and more—which initially seem disparate but are inevitably connected. In the first substantive segment, a young lacrosse player named Nick Brothers explains what happened to him and his team in 1999.

A group of strangers who live near each other in London become fast friends after writing their deepest secrets in a shared notebook.Julian Jessop, a septuagenarian artist, is bone-crushingly lonely when he starts "The Authenticity Project"as he titles a slim green notebookand begins its first handwritten entry questioning how well people know each other in his tiny corner of London.

In this otherworldly novel, a cantankerous surgeon in a remote village in India attempts to revive a dead family.A surgeon is about to leave his clinic for the night when a teacher, his pregnant wife, and their boy make a special request. They are undead, recently murdered by attackers, but an angel has promised them that if the surgeon repairs their injuries by dawn, they'll be returned to the land of the living.

Cast adrift in the Depression-era West after the last of her relatives pass away, Zorrie survives by working at a radium processing plant before finding love, community and unexpected loss upon returning to her small Indiana hometown.This book was a finalist for the National Book Award.