Recommendations based on "Strange Houses: A Novel"

New York Times Bestseller"There is no writer quite like Dolly Alderton working today and very soon the world will know it.” —Lisa Taddeo, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Three Women“Dolly Alderton has always been a sparkling Roman candle of talent. She is funny, smart, and explosively engaged in the wonders and weirdness of the world. But what makes this memoir more than mere entertainment is the mature and sophisticated evolution that Alderton describes in these pages. It’s a beautifully told journey and a thoughtful, important book. I loved it.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and City of GirlsThe wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking internationally bestselling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the rideWhen it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else— realizing that you are enough.Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTSHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZEBrace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement—and a great gift for its readers.When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.

A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered...if indeed there were crimes.The youngest of forty--a child with no name and no past--she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden--in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights--she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.Then everything changes...and nothing changes.A young woman who has never known men--a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints--must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been...and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom. A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered...if indeed there were crimes.The youngest of forty--a child with no name and no past--she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden--in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights--she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.Then everything changes...and nothing changes.A young woman who has never known men--a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints--must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been...and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK“Hard to put down, harder to forget.” — Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling authorWhite lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel.Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of the multimillion-copybestselling A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series comes a new blockbuster thriller about a road trip that turns deadly.Eight hours. Six friends. Five survive.Red Kenny is on a road trip for spring break with five friends: Her best friend - the older brother - his perfect girlfriend - a secret crush - a classmate - and a killer.When their RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere with no cell service, they soon realize this is no accident. They have been trapped by someone out there in the dark, someone who clearly wants one of them dead.With eight hours until dawn, the six friends must escape, or figure out which of them is the target. But is there a liar among them? Buried secrets will be forced to light and tensions inside the RV will reach deadly levels. Not all of them will survive the night. . . .With edge-of-your-seat tension and a gripping mystery, Holly Jackson has written another instant classic!

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963--only a month before the author's suicide--Sylvia Plath's harrowing autobiographical novel traces a young woman's descent into an emotional breakdown. The brilliant and disturbing story of Esther Greenwood's journey from the glamorous world of magazine publishing in New York to the isolating world of the asylum has become one of the most famous books of the late twentieth century, and still has all its power to shock and move us.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (The New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss.Look for The Testaments, the bestselling, award-winning the sequel to The Handmaid’s TaleIn Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic.Includes an introduction by Margaret Atwood

Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from USA Today bestselling author Rebecca Yarros.Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of dragon riders.But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways graduate or die

“Uketsu is a disrupter, the master of quiet horror.”—Janice Hallett, internationally bestselling author of The Appeal“Delightfully macabre and fiendishly clever. Seemingly unconnected stories tie themselves into a complicated knot, which Uketsu masterfully unravels.”—G. T. Karber, author of the national bestseller MurdleThe spine-tingling "triumphant international debut" (Publishers Weekly starred review) that has taken Japan by storm—an eerie fresh take on mystery-horror in which a series of seemingly innocent pictures draws you into a disturbing web of unsolved mysteries and shattered psyches.An exploration of the macabre, where the seemingly mundane takes on a terrifying significance. . . .A pregnant woman's sketches on a seemingly innocuous blog conceal a chilling warning.A child's picture of his home contains a dark secret message.A sketch made by a murder victim in his final moments leads an amateur sleuth down a rabbithole that will reveal a horrifying reality.Structured around these nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue, Uketsu invites readers to piece together the mystery behind each and the over-arching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the internationally bestselling debut from mystery horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.Translated from the Japanese by Jim Rion