Here One Moment
If you knew your future, would you try to fight fate?
Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed.
Because on this ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future—age 103!—and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all.
How do they know this? There were ostensibly more interesting people on the flight (the bride and groom, the jittery, possibly famous woman, the giant Hemsworth-esque guy who looks like an off-duty superhero, the frazzled, gorgeous flight attendant) but none would become as famous as “The Death Lady.”
Not a single passenger or crew member will later recall noticing her board the plane. She wasn’t exceptionally old or young, rude or polite. She wasn’t drunk or nervous or pregnant. Her appearance and demeanor were unremarkable. But what she did on that flight was truly remarkable.
A few months later, one passenger dies exactly as she predicted. Then two more passengers die, again, as she said they would. Soon no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story at a cocktail party.
If you were told you only had a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try to dodge your destiny?
Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment is a brilliantly constructed tale that looks at free will and destiny, grief and love, and the endless struggle to maintain certainty and control in an uncertain world. A modern-day Jane Austen who humorously skewers social mores while spinning a web of mystery, Moriarty asks profound questions in her newest I-can’t-wait-to-find-out-what-happens novel.
The Exception to the Rule (The Improbable Meet-Cute #1)
On February 14, an accidental email to a stranger opens the door to an unexpected relationship in a captivating short story by the New York Times bestselling authors of The Unhoneymooners.
One typo, and a boy and girl connect by chance. Wishing each other a happy Valentine’s Day isn’t the end. In fact, it becomes a friendly annual tradition—with rules: no pics, no real names, nothing too personal. As years pass, the rules for their email “dates” are breaking, and they’re sharing more than they imagined—including the urge to ask…what if we actually met?
Christina Lauren’s The Exception to the Rule is part of The Improbable Meet-Cute, irresistibly romantic stories about finding love when and where you least expect it. They can be read or listened to in one sitting.
The Woman in the Cabin
The brand-new thriller from the bestselling author of The Girl Beyond the Gate!
Deep in the woods, you can hide more than secrets...
Every day, in a remote cabin hidden deep in the woods in the Scottish Highlands, Mary wakes up before dawn to make breakfast from scratch. She tends the garden and feeds the animals. Every night, Mary makes sure she has dinner on the table for when her husband Cal gets home from work.
She puts on his favorite lipstick and greets him with a smile. 'I've missed you.' It's not true and he knows it. But he likes to hear it all the same.
Mary is the perfect wife and like any good wife she knows her job is to keep her husband happy.
But lately as she notices her first wrinkles appear, she can sense Cal change. A scowl at dinner not being ready on time, a too tight grip as he leads her to the bedroom tells her he's noticed too. And old memories are coming back too, of her life before the cabin...
Then she finds a stack of letters hidden under the floorboards detailing a life eerily similar to her own. They're addressed to her: 'To the next woman.'
If she's not the first to play the role of Cal's perfect wife, what happened to the woman in the cabin before her? And how long does she have until she is next?
PS: I Hate You
Maddie Sanderson would be proud to honor her older brother’s dying wish, that she scatters his ashes over eight destinations that the adventurous 29-year-old never got to visit before he died from cancer. But in his will, Josh assigned her an impossible partner to help complete the mission—Dominic Perry. Seriously, if Maddie weren’t already at his funeral, she would have killed him for this.
Sure, Dom was Josh’s life-long best friend. He’s also the infuriating man who broke Maddie’s heart back when she was naïve enough to give it to him. But since Dom insists on following the rules and Josh didn’t leave much room for Maddie to argue the matter, they embark together on a farewell trip that spans thousands of miles, exploring new places and revisiting their complicated history along the way.
After a snowstorm leads to a shared bed, Maddie starts to wonder if her brother might be matchmaking from the grave. But when grief also reopens old wounds between them, Maddie will need more than Josh’s ghostly guidance to trust Dom again.
Open Heaven
A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening.
Set in a remote village in the North of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two sixteen year old boys meet and transform each other’s lives.
James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him, like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre, drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.
Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.
Friends of the Museum
Coworkers at a legendary but troubled New York City museum struggle with issues large and small over the course of one extraordinary day in this whip-smart “marvel” (Mona Awad, bestselling author of Bunny) of a novel in the vein of The White Lotus.
When Diane Schwebe, the director of a major New York museum, is awakened in the early morning by a text message from the museum’s lawyer, it is the start of a twenty-four hour roller-coaster ride.
Diane has sacrificed many things in her life to help the fading institution stave off irrelevance and financial ruin. In this battle, she’s surrounded by her stalwart her enigmatic and tireless personal assistant, Chris; the museum’s trusty head of security, Shay; and its general counsel, Henry—a man whose ability to weasel his way out of a jam is matched only by his capacity to avoid learning anything from the experience.
Orbiting Diane is a motley assortment of museum employees, each on the precipice of collapse or among them a line cook staring down a huge opportunity he’s not sure he wants; a costume curator stuck in an inescapable rut; and the ambivalent curator of the museum’s film program, whose first day on the job might very well be his last.
On this day of the museum’s annual gala, every plate that Diane has kept spinning will fall and by daybreak, someone will be dead.
Wise, surprising, and darkly funny, Friends of the Museum is a kaleidoscopic tragicomedy that surges along to the unstoppable tick of the clock, leaving you on the edge of your seat until the final second.
Zeal
The New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and Caul Baby returns with an epic, multi-generational novel that illuminates the legacy of slavery and the power of romantic love.
Harlem, 2019. Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party. As the guests get ready to leave, he hands her a love letter on a yellowing, crumbling piece of paper . . .
Natchez, 1865. Discharged from the Union Army as a free man after the war’s end, Harrison returns to Mississippi to reunite with the woman he loves, Tirzah. Upon his arrival at the Freedmen’s Bureau, though, he catches the eye of a woman working there, who’s determined to thwart his efforts to find his beloved. After tragedy strikes, Harrison resigns himself to a life with her.
Meanwhile in Louisiana, the newly free Tirzah is teaching at the Freedmen’s School, and discovers an advertisement in the local paper looking for her. Though she knows Harrison must have placed it, and longs to find him, the risks of fleeing are too great, and Tirzah chooses the life of seeming security right in front of her.
Spanning over a hundred and fifty years, Morgan Jerkins’s extraordinary novel intertwines the stories of these star-crossed lovers and their descendants. As Tirzah's family moves across the country during the Great Migration, they challenge authority with devastating consequences, while of the legacy of heartbreak and loss continues on in the lives of Harrison's progeny.
When Ardelia meets Oliver, she finds his family’s history is as full of secrets and omissions as her own. Could their connection be a cosmic reconciliation satisfying the unfulfilled desires of their ancestors, or will the weight of the past, present and future tear them apart?
Sweeping, textured, and meticulously researched, Zeal is both a story of how one generation’s choices reverberate through the years and an indelible portrait of an enduring love.
