Fallow

by Sarah Anderson

Labor in all its forms is cleverly and hilariously toyed with in Sarah Anderson's enthralling debut novel, Fallow, in which a young woman spends her 20s as a surrogate for an unnamed corporation referred to as "The Company." Directionless 23-year-old Natalie is an hourly worker at a call center that fields workplace complaints when she suddenly finds herself in need of extra cash for dental work. One of her 10 sisters turns her on to selling her plasma at the blood bank, where she learns of a mysterious opportunity

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An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America

by Keri Leigh Merritt

One of the U.S. South's most outspoken champions of racial justice and civil rights emerges from history's forgotten halls in Keri Leigh Merritt's revelatory biography, An Inconvenient Woman. Lillian Smith (1897-1966) bucked every stereotype of her time: as a white woman in the South during Jim Crow, she was a fearless advocate for desegregation and civil rights, and she was a lesbian who lived with the love of her life, literary critic Paula Snelling.

Drawing upon unpublished archival material, Merritt provides

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True North: On the Road in Canada

by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux has spent more than 50 years closely depicting the world, for example, on the trains of Asia in The Great Railway Bazaar or the heart of Africa in Dark Star Safari. Travel writing is more than simple adventure for him: "I always knew travel to be an enlargement of life, something richer than anything I'd experience at home. But... travel also offers an expansion of time."

True North focuses on a country that many in the U.S. have spent decades failing to actually see: Canada. What begins as the

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Death in the Tallgrass

by Andrea L. Rogers

In this slow-burn middle-grade murder mystery by Walter Dean Myers Award-winning author Andrea L. Rogers (Man Made Monsters), a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, a family grapples with complicated roots and societal transformation in late-1960s Oklahoma.

Twelve-year-old Cynthia's maternal grandparents are Cherokee, but she knows little about her heritage and is disconnected from her white paternal grandparents. When Cynthia's dad is recruited to teach law at the University of Tulsa, he makes a shaky truce with

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The Grimlore Game

by Kalyn Josephson, illus. by Alla Khatkevich

The Grimlore Game by Kalyn Josephson (Ravenfall series) is a cozy gothic mystery with a clever protagonist who masks her anxiety and grief over her parents' deaths with eccentricity, insouciance, and love for a pet tarantula named Gregor.

Thirteen-year-old orphan Kit Devlin's family is under a curse. Every three years on April 13, "like clockwork," a Devlin dies. This year it's Kit's wealthy and renowned Grandfather Amos. Rather than a simple will distributing his apparently vast wealth, he leaves instructions

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To Our Untamed Core

by Sonido Reyes

National Book Award finalist Sonido Reyes (The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School) writes an electrifying, utterly gripping YA dystopia in To Our Untamed Core, about three boys who must survive a televised death match.

Over 600 years ago, conquistadors from the Order of Light brought their "righteous God" to the people of the Afueras. Now, all Afuereños are subjects of the colonial Holy Order and given state-mandated pills to "tame their innate violence." Any Afuereño who steps out of the Holy

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