Collection: Adult

Every book tells a story. This one tells a secret.

A young bookbinder begins a hunt for the truth when a confession hidden beneath the binding of a burned book reveals a story of forbidden love, lost fortune, and murder. Now a USA Today bestseller!

Lilian ("Lily") Delaney, apprentice to a master bookbinder in Oxford in 1901, chafes at the confines of her life. She is trapped between the oppressiveness of her father's failing bookshop and still being an apprentice in a man's profession. But when she's given a burned book during a visit to a collector, she finds, hidden beneath the binding, a fifty-year-old letter speaking of love, fortune, and murder.

Lily is pulled into the mystery of the young lovers, a story of forbidden love, and discovers there are more books and more hidden pages telling their story. Lilian becomes obsessed with the story but she is not the only one looking for the remaining books and what began as a diverting intrigue quickly becomes a very dangerous pursuit.

Lily's search leads her from the eccentric booksellers of London to the private libraries of unscrupulous collectors and the dusty archives of society papers, deep into the heart of the mystery. But with sinister forces closing in, willing to do anything for the books, Lilian's world begins to fall apart and she must decide if uncovering the truth is worth the risk to her own life.

* This stunning edition includes full-color designed endpapers, unique foiled front and back case stamps, and special interior design elements. While supplies last! *

An affecting novel about an unforgettable group of friends trying to make their way in the world without losing themselves, or one another.

Diana, Justin, Errol, and Vivian were always told that success is guaranteed by following a simple checklist. They worked hard, got A's, and attended a good university--only to graduate into the Great Recession of 2008. Now, despite their newly minted degrees, they're unemployed and stuck again under their parents' roofs in a hypercompetitive Chinese American community. So when Grace--once the neighborhood golden child, now a Harvard Law School dropout--asks to make a documentary about the crew, they agree. It's not like her little movie will ever see the light of day.

But then the video, Bad Asians, goes viral on an up-and-coming media platform (YouTube, anyone?). Suddenly, millions of people know them as cruel caricatures, each full of pent-up frustrations with the others. And after a desperate attempt at spin control further derails their plans for the lives they'd always imagined, the friends must face harsh truths about themselves and coming of age in the new millennium.

Lillian Li's novel wryly captures a generation shaped by the rise of the internet and the end of the American dream. An epic tale of friendship and family, Bad Asians asks, Can the same people who made you who you are end up keeping you from who you're meant to be?

Leading evolutionary theorists and philosophers come together to understand how organisms persist, even as they're riddled with internal conflict, from cancer cells to selfish genes.

How does a vast menagerie of organs, tissues, cells, and genes coalesce to form a unified organism? For centuries, biologists and philosophers have taken this astonishing feat for granted, treating it as a matter of divine will or evolutionary inevitability. Yet unity is hardly assured. From cancer cells to selfish genes, the body is riven by internal conflicts.

The Paradox of the Organism grapples with this puzzle. As the essays in this collection show, profound questions arise when we pierce the organismal veil and consider the self-replicating elements within. Is an organism really a cohesive agent that adapts to the ecosystem it inhabits? Or is an organism itself an ecosystem, within which individual components are engaged in a continuous arms race?

The answers have immediate implications: for understanding miscarriage, treating cancer, improving psychological health, and preserving biodiversity. Challenging fundamental precepts of evolutionary theory, The Paradox of the Organism offers an incisive account of life's extraordinary success.

A richly detailed transoceanic history of the early French Empire, illuminating how it became bound by a common legal culture of race--as well as how enslaved and free people critically shaped the development of the colonies.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India.

The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground--especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways.

Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world--and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building.

A revisionist account arguing that Indian nationalism served as a laboratory for fascist ideas that continue to animate the Hindutva political movement of today.

Fascism swept the world in the 1920s and 1930s, but not only because of the seductive rhetoric of Mussolini, Hitler, and their collaborators. In India as well, a distinctive brand of fascist thought emerged--influenced by Euro-American ideologies but also departing from them in critical ways. The first systematic examination of this political philosophy, Fascism in India revises our sense of what fascism can be, while demonstrating that it is very much with us in the form of Hindutva, the ethnonationalist movement at the center of Indian politics today.

Luna Sabastian offers a novel interpretation of Hindutva: both its canonical formulation by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and its reinvention by Deendayal Upadhyaya after Indian independence. Sabastian shows how Hindutva generated ideas of Hindu race and religion that had the potential to erase Muslims not through genocide or ethnic cleansing but by means of violent absorption. Focusing on aggressive miscegenation, Indian fascists proposed a singular kind of racial project, eschewing notions of purity even while maintaining a starkly eliminationist objective. Fascism in India also grapples with Hindutva ideas of caste and its relation to race--particularly in comparison with Nazi uses of these concepts--and of sovereignty, which Indian fascists envisioned beyond the "blood and soil" narrative of the nation-state. Finally, Sabastian reflects on Hindutva's reorientation toward Hindu piety after the creation of Pakistan effectively resolved India's "Muslim problem."

Bringing clarity to an ideology little understood in the West, Fascism in India is an eye-opening perspective on Hindutva and a profound meditation on the proliferation and evolution of right-wing thought.

An elegant compendium of Calle's unfinished, abandoned or "failed" works of art

"I have a horror of the finished. Death is final. The gunshot is final. The almost finished is life," said Pablo Picasso. "But," replies Sophie Calle, "when everything stops, what will become of the ideas that stagnate, that wait their time in boxes, in coffins? Before disappearing, it's necessary to make an inventory of sketches, attempts and abandonments, and bring intentions to life. A way of ending things."
This volume follows the artist's 2024 exhibition À toi de faire, ma mignonne at the Musée Picasso in Paris, marking the first time that French artist Sophie Calle has showcased a selection of her unfinished or abandoned projects, which she also understands as her failures. These stories, stamped with a verdict in red indicating the reason for their incompleteness, offer a mirror to her True Stories, a book regularly reissued since 1994. In this eventful collection, which reveals all the submerged aspects of a body of work spanning several decades, we find the main motifs of her work, such as chance, chance encounters and, above all, her key idea of incompletion as a result, trial and failure as corollaries of artistic action--an echo of Picasso's philosophy from decades ago. In this book, Calle takes stock of a lifetime of artistic creation, and hints at future challenges.
Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.

CELEBRATE THE BEAUTY OF THE BURGER.

This in-depth guide takes you on a whistle-stop tour of the best patties and buns from around the USA and the world beyond, plus must-know lingo and recipes to make your own.

Burgers are a serious business, and The Burger Bible is your one-stop guide to all things patty and bun, from esteemed restaurant critic and food writer Maggie Hennessy (New York Times, Bon Appetit, Time Out).

Packed with meaty content, including:

- Profiles of the 80 top burgers in the world right now, from food trucks to high-end cuisine
- Recipes to create your own perfect burger at home
- The Burgerpedia - breaking down the must-know lingo and ingredients
- The complete guide to burger culture

And much more beyond. Featuring hundreds of photographs of burgers and restaurants as well as bespoke illustrations and Hennessy's expert text throughout, this is the complete handbook on the humble hamburger.

A practical, must-have handbook for botanical artists that can be returned to time and time again, in association with the RHS and created with the input of its team of botany experts.

Unlike botanical art books that focus only on painting techniques, and botany books that do not take account of the artist's method, Watercolour Botanical Art balances both botany information and the painting practice used to depict it.

The intended reader is any artist who wishes to be more informed about botany; who needs to tackle the challenges of painting complex and particular botanical structures; who wants to learn what to look out for; and discover variations and morphological parts that are not obvious.

Part One focuses on botanical forms and considerations. Each entry in the directory of morphological terms will include:
Diagrams and text describing the plant morphology
Artists' Considerations: a checklist to follow when examining a plant
Paintings from celebrated botanical artists

Part Two focuses on practical considerations for artists describing painting techniques in step-by-step detail. This section also includes practical tips for working outdoors, visiting plant collections, and collecting or photographing plant specimens for study.

A chilling horror-thriller debut where a mother's search for her missing daughter battles against the shadows of a historic, dangerous legend.

Single mother Jenna arrives on the tranquil shores of Athelsea fueled by the desperate hope to find Chloe, her teenage daughter who's disappeared from their London home. She has no idea why-all she knows is that Chloe had changed in the previous two weeks, haunted by something, or someone, and the ferry ticket here is the only clue she has.

As she explores the village and interacts with the locals, Jenna soon realizes a macabre secret is being hidden in plain sight. A dark legend of a vengeful woman called the Bone Queen is spoken of in hushed tones amongst the villagers, some of whom are frantically trying to suppress the tale that has long terrorized their lives.

As Jenna starts to learn more about the Bone Queen and her previous victims, the village's grip on reality begins to loosen and no one can say for sure who, or what, is responsible for the deaths and disappearances on Athelsea. Suffering from what she can no longer distinguish between paranoid hallucinations or real manifestations, Jenna must act quickly before Chloe is next...

The Bone Queen has left her mark, and one day she'll collect.

From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life.

What is life?

What is death?

What makes a body a person?

What makes a planet a world?

In Traversal, Maria Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with the bewilderment of being alive--our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems--through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads--the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue--to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet clearer as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living.

By turns epic and intimate--as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to one another--Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.

A hijacked New York subway train, an anonymous killer, and a young man trapped by his hidden past converge in a breathless, breathtaking thriller

Do not turn off your phone
Do not get off the train
I know who you really are

Fired and walked out by security on his first day at his new job in New York City, Ben Cross thought his day couldn't get worse. But he couldn't be more wrong. Getting on the 1 train headed uptown, Ben starts receiving text messages from an anonymous killer, showing that they've already killed someone, then pointedly killing another as they got off the train to prove they aren't bluffing and to ensure Ben follows orders. But Ben wasn't picked at random--he has a history that no one is supposed to know.

At the same time, A NYPD detective, Kelly Hendricks, is on punishment duty with the transit police. The first one on the scene after the first murder, she gets on the train to find out what is really going on.

Switching rapidly between Cross and Hendricks, as the hijacked 1 train heads from South Ferry to 181st, the secret to the killer lies in Ben's own history--why he's been targeted and punished.

Dark domestic suspense meets haunted house horror in this unnerving adult debut guaranteed to keep you awake for days afterward, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Don't Let the Forest In and Hazelthorn

The walls are closing in on her perfect new life.

Single mother Elodie's life has become a fairy tale. She's met Bren, equal parts Golden-retriever-devoted and sinfully handsome. He's whisked her and her autistic son, Jude, to the crumbling family house he's renovating. She has a new husband, a new house, and a new baby on the way. Everything is perfect.

Until Jude claims he can hear voices in the walls. He says their renovations are "hurting" the house. Even Elodie can't ignore it―something strange is going on.

The question is, Is it with the house, or with her son?

And what is Elodie hiding?

"A masterpiece." - Ava Reid

"Brilliantly tense, paranoid, masterfully wrought." - Dawn Kurtagich

"Prepare to have your heartstrings clawed." - T. Marie Vandelly

"Read this book and be enthralled." --The New York Times

A Parade Most Anticipated Book of the Year

The page-turning story of three women reporters and the way they changed the world, work, and journalism.

She hid on a Red Cross boat to reach Omaha Beach on D-Day. She walked the abandoned streets of Hong Kong to take food to her daughter's father, a prisoner of war. She fought off the advances of overzealous Yugoslavian diplomats, found overlooked details of world history in a dentist's kitchen in Sarajevo. She traveled alone to Mexico. She traveled alone to Congo. She traveled alone to the American South. She married Hemingway. She married a Chinese poet-playboy-publisher, then married a British war hero. She fell in love with H. G. Wells. She gave birth and raised a child on her own. She landed on the front page of the newspaper. She wrote for the great magazines of her time--Vogue, The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar. She wrote a play. She wrote a memoir. She wrote a genre-breaking travel narrative. She wrote bestsellers. She wrote and wrote and wrote. She changed the very way we think about writing and the way journalists craft stories--which sources are viable, which details are important--and the way women move and work in the world.

She was Martha Gellhorn. She was Emily "Mickey" Hahn. She was Rebecca West. Each woman was starry-eyed for success, for adventure, and helped ensure that other starry and restless women could make unforgettable lives for themselves. They fought for their lives and their work. They were praised and criticized for it all.

In language as lively and nimble, in passages as intimate and adventurous, and with conviction as fierce and indefatigable as her subjects' own, Julia Cooke's Starry and Restless plays out the stories of three women across three decades and five continents. Martha, Mickey, Rebecca--journalists, authors, mothers, lovers, friends. These women didn't just bear witness to the great changes of the twentieth century; their curiosity, grit, ambition, and stories changed the world.

DELUXE EDITION--featuring beautiful sprayed edges!

Ditch the bullsh*t and live lighter

Life's too short for all that emotional heavy lifting. The Let That Sh*t Go Guide to Life is the helpful shove you need to give fewer f*cks and to throw both arms around the good stuff. Sprinkled with positive profanity and silly self-awareness, this glittering path to contentment offers friend-to-friend advice for understanding the stress that zaps its way into your day, letting go of the chaos you can't control, and realizing that you don't have to have it all figured out to be happy. Whether you're struggling with work, goal setting, love, friendship, or just not being so f*cking hard on yourself, this delightfully un-self-helpy book shows you how to make your life a little bit lighter, a little more joyful, and a little more yours.

A MOST ANTICIPATED Book (Oprah Daily, Essence, Bustle, Stylist, Missing Perspectives, and more!)

"The first CAN'T MISS page-turner of 2026." --Oprah Daily - "EXCEPTIONAL." --Forbes - "CAPTIVATING." --Essence - "Sizzling...A SEXY, FAST-PACED ride!" --Tia Williams, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author

In development as a MAJOR TV SERIES with Hulu!

A juicy debut novel that peeks behind the curtain at the cutthroat world of hip-hop music and the glamorous magazine scene in the late 1990s, written by the ultimate insider

It's 1999, and Nikki Rose is the only Black editor on the staff of a prestigious fashion magazine she once thought would be her ticket to becoming a respected editor in chief. But after being told one too many times by her boss that "Black girls don't sell magazines," she quits to take over Sugar, a struggling hip hop music and lifestyle magazine with untapped potential.

Thrown into an entirely new world of wealth, decadence, and debauchery, Nikki has just six months to save Sugar--and her own dreams. As she pulls all-nighters at the office and parties with New York City's most influential bad boys, Nikki must prove she has what it takes to lead. But her most dangerous challenge is evading Alonzo Griffin, her very married, very powerful ex-lover and former boss, who is determined to destroy both her and Sugar. Along the way, Nikki leans on a circle of loyal friends and navigates unexpected romances that force her to reckon with what--and who--she truly wants.

If I Ruled the World is a smart, utterly immersive journey through one of the most dynamic eras in pop culture history--a story of ambition, friendship, love, and finding your own voice.

"Gregory E. O'Malley's The Escapes of David George is a gripping, novelistic study of the remarkable man whose life forces all of us to reexamine the realities of colonial slavery and the conflicted legacies of the American Revolution." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"remarkable ... intriguing ... an inspiring portrait of an enslaved man" --The Wall Street Journal

When most Americans think of slavery, they do not picture the colonial or revolutionary eras. Yet, in fact, one of six inhabitants of the thirteen original colonies was enslaved. The Escapes of David George: an Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution reveals a remarkable, untold experience of the American revolutionary period--a Black man's quest for the freedom espoused by our Founders, but denied him and other enslaved people.

In 1762, at the age of 19, David George escaped from a plantation in Virginia. Running southwest by night, fording rivers and crossing borders, he embarked on a decades-long journey in and out of captivity that spanned multiple colonies and thousands of miles. George lived among White, Black, Creek, and Natchez settlements, fled to the British Army for the promise of liberty, founded what might have been the first Black Baptist church, helped to hack a settlement for refugees out of the Nova Scotia wilderness, and died as a leader of an experimental anti-slavery community in Sierra Leone.

Piecing together archival records and David George's own brief account of his life--the earliest written testimony by a fugitive enslaved person in North America--Gregory O'Malley presents a thrilling narrative and a unique perspective on our nation's origins, principles, and contradictions.