All Stray Dogs Go To Heaven: Krishna Candeth

Published by BluOne Ink, 2023, 540 pages “We eat our poisons young and then trawl the world the rest of our lives, looking for antidotes.” Humans are intrinsically storytellers, and the stories we tell about ourselves shape who we are. They give form to our world, and each of us carries our own personal world …

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Classic Horror Stories

Edited by David Stuart DaviesPublished by Macmillan, 2024, 310 pages There is something about reading a well-written horror story: the chills that run down your spine, the fear, and the feeling of being in the story while sitting at a comfortable distance from any actual danger. This collection is guaranteed to make you shiver, with …

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Orbital: Samantha Harvey

Published by Vintage, 2023, 136 pages “Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams—of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in the dark, and of the bright energetic black of space …

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The Secret Lives of Church Ladies: Deesha Philyaw

Published by One, 2020, 217 pages A girl watches her mother make the perfect peach cobbler every week for her date with the married pastor; a woman writes to her half-sister about whose existence she learns only after their father dies; and two women live together in the cold north, far from their southern roots. …

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The Count of Monte Cristo: Alexandre Dumas

Translated from French by Robin BussPublished by Penguin, 1996, 1276 pages. Original version serialized in 1844-46 and published as a book in 1846. First unabridged translation by Emma Hardy, 1846. France, 1815. Napoleon is in exile, but has escaped from Elba. The Bourbons are on the throne. France is divided between the Bonapartists, who secretly …

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Such a Good Family: Caitlin Weaver

Published by Storm Publishing, 2024, 352 pages. Two perfect suburban families: Lorrie and Ed, and their children Knox, Archie and Chloé; and Eden and Witt, and their daughter Summer. Summer and Knox, both seniors in high school, are dating. Lorrie and Eden—who are very close friends—joke about the children getting married and becoming each other’s …

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Station Island: Seamus Heaney

Published by Faber & Faber, 1984, 123 pages. “I was stretched between contemplationof a motionless pointand the command to participateactively in history.”—Away from It All, quote from Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Definition The thread that runs through this collection the poet’s role in history and politics. Is the poet an observer or …

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The Hacienda: Isabel Cañas

Published by Solaris, 2023, 345 pages. Beatriz marries Rodolfo Solórzano, a wealthy landowner, to escape her circumstances as a poor relative who is treated by her aunt as a servant. But when she arrives at the Hacienda San Isidro, the home that is to be her domain, it is not at all as she had …

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Breaking the Veil of Politeness: An Interview with Usha Raman

Usha Raman is an Indian author and poet. She is also a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad. Her first novel, Polite Conversations, was published in 2024. Her other books include Writing for the Media (2010); a collection of poems, All the Spaces in Between (2009); and a children’s book, …

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Murder in the Pettah: Jeanne Cambrai

Published by Penguin, 2001, 483 pages. The body of a young English woman is found in the Pettah—a disreputable part of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Not a place where you would wander around at night. So what was the young woman, Dorothy Bell, doing in the Pettah? Who killed her? Dorothy’s father, Reginald Bell, a wealthy …

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