Everything's great for Harper Isabelle, the most popular girl in grade nine. That is, until she meets Sarah Jamieson. Sarah is a reclusive artist, a loner who wears black makeup and doesn't have any friends, but for some reason, Harper can't stop thinking about her. Sarah isn't used to people looking her way, especially popular girls like Harper Isabelle. Scared, religious, and unsure of herself, when Sarah begins to realize that her feelings for Harper might go beyond friendship, she is afraid to take the plunge and tell Harper how she feels. Emotions build between these young women until they both reach their breaking points, and they need to make a choice about coming to terms with who they really are, and what they can and cannot live without.
Younger star and LGBTQIA+ advocate Nico Tortorella investigates love, sex, gender, addiction, family, fame, and fluidity through their personal story and the lens of their nonbinary identity “Nico Tortorella embodies the twenty-first-century human.”—RuPaul Nico Tortorella is a seeker. Raised on a steady regimen of Ram Dass and raw food, they have always been interested in the more spiritual aspects of life. That is, until the desire for fame and fortune eclipsed their journey toward enlightenment and sent them into a downward spiral of addiction and self-destructive behavior. It wasn’t until Nico dug deep and began to examine the fluidity of both their sexuality and gender identity that they became more comfortable in their own skin, got sober from alcohol, entered into an unconventional marriage with the love of their life, and fully embraced a queer lifestyle that afforded them the opportunity to explore the world outside the gender binary. It was precisely in that space between that Nico encountered the diverse community of open-minded, supportive peers they’d always dreamed of having. Expanding on themes explored on their popular podcast, The Love Bomb, Nico shares the intimate details of their romantic partnerships, the dysfunction of their loud but loving Italian family, and the mingling of their feminine and masculine identities into one multidimensional, sexually fluid, nonbinary individual. Nico has become a leading voice of the fluidity movement by encouraging open dialogue and universal acceptance. Space Between is at once an education for readers, a manifesto for both the labeled and label-free generations, and a personal memoir of love, identity, and acceptance. Praise for Space Between “In an industry that thrives on artifice, Nico Tortorella’s candid soul-searching is precious and invigorating. As with the best truth-telling, it gives language to a thirst we had forgotten, while also quenching it. This is a book about addiction, familial trauma, and gender—yes—but more so it is about living. Living is an art form that Nico does well, and this book is an argument for making meaning from the messiness that surrounds us rather than simply muting it. Nico’s distinct and relatable prose tangos us past binaries, toward an intimacy beyond language.”—Alok Vaid-Menon
There’s this weird gap in life that’s fuelled by cheap tacos and even cheaper tequila – also known as our twenties. It’s a specific limbo between being a teenager and a Proper Adult, and though it’s wildly confusing, often lonely, sometimes embarrassing and frequently daunting, there’s also a whole lot of magic to be found in the chaos. It’s a time when we’re finding our own voices, cementing our relationships and starting to fulfil our big ambitions (or simply just working out what they are). Michelle Andrews and Zara McDonald, creators of the award-winning pop culture podcast Shameless, are two of the many twentysomething women trying to make sense of it all. They definitely don’t have all the answers but they know that mapping out our place in the world is a little bit easier when we do it together. Brimming with wit and unflinching honesty, these are their stories and personal puzzles about life as twentysomethings: from heartbreak and mental health challenges to overcoming career setbacks and letting go of fear. (Not forgetting the deeper meaning behind the states of their fridges and why it’s so damn good to ghost out of a friend’s party.) Join Zara and Michelle as they figure out who they are now and who they want to be. You just might find tiny pieces of yourself in the space between the first page and the last.
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • An outsider who can travel between worlds discovers a secret that threatens the very fabric of the multiverse in this stunning debut, a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging. WINNER OF THE COMPTON CROOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD • “Gorgeous writing, mind-bending world-building, razor-sharp social commentary, and a main character who demands your attention—and your allegiance.”—Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—NPR, Library Journal, Book Riot Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying—from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total. On this dystopian Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now what once made her marginalized has finally become an unexpected source of power. She has a nice apartment on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works—and shamelessly flirts—with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect off-world data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security. But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and her future in ways she could have never imagined—and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world but the entire multiverse. “Clever characters, surprise twists, plenty of action, and a plot that highlights social and racial inequities in astute prose.”—Library Journal (starred review)
Not your everyday coming-of-age novel. This story was supposed to be about Evie—how she hasn't made a friend in years, how she tends to stretch the truth (especially about her so-called relationship with college drop-out Jonah Luks), and how she finally comes into her own once she learns to just be herself—but it isn't. Because when her classmate Elizabeth "Zabet" McCabe's murdered body is found in the woods, everything changes—and Evie's life is never the same again.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Diana Gabaldon returns to her Outlander universe in “The Space Between,” an irresistible novella brimming with adventure, history, and suspense. Joan MacKimmie is on her way to Paris to take up her vocation as a nun. Yet her decision is less a matter of faith than fear, for Joan is plagued by mysterious voices that speak of the future, and by visions that mark those about to die. The sanctuary of the nunnery promises respite from these unwanted visitations . . . or so she prays. Her chaperone is Michael Murray, a young widower who, though he still mourns the death of his wife, finds himself powerfully drawn to his charge. But when the time-traveling Comte St. Germain learns of Joan’s presence in Paris, and of her link to Claire Fraser—La Dame Blanche—Murray is drawn into a battle whose stakes are not merely the life but the very soul of the Scotswoman who, without even trying, has won his heart. Praise for Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series “A grand adventure written on a canvas that probes the heart, weighs the soul and measures the human spirit across [centuries].”—CNN, on The Fiery Cross “History comes deliciously alive on the page.”—New York Daily News, on Outlander “Abounds with Gabaldon’s sexy combination of humor, wild adventure and, underlying it all, the redemptive power of true love.”—The Dallas Morning News, on The Fiery Cross “Gabaldon is a born storyteller. . . . The pages practically turn themselves.”—The Arizona Republic, on Dragonfly in Amber “Wonderful . . . This is escapist historical fiction at its best.”—San Antonio Express-News, on Drums of Autumn
A Recommended Summer Read from The Verge and io9 A Recommended June Read from Hello Giggles and Tor.com When the world ends, where will you go? In a breathtakingly vivid and emotionally gripping debut novel, one woman must confront the emptiness in the universe—and in her own heart—when a devastating virus reduces most of humanity to dust and memories. All Jamie Allenby ever wanted was space. Even though she wasn’t forced to emigrate from Earth, she willingly left the overpopulated, claustrophobic planet. And when a long relationship devolved into silence and suffocating sadness, she found work on a frontier world on the edges of civilization. Then the virus hit... Now Jamie finds herself dreadfully alone, with all that’s left of the dead. Until a garbled message from Earth gives her hope that someone from her past might still be alive. Soon Jamie finds other survivors, and their ragtag group will travel through the vast reaches of space, drawn to the promise of a new beginning on Earth. But their dream will pit them against those desperately clinging to the old ways. And Jamie’s own journey home will help her close the distance between who she has become and who she is meant to be...
The Space between Us brings the connection between geography, psychology, and politics to life. By going into the neighborhoods of real cities, Enos shows how our perceptions of racial, ethnic, and religious groups are intuitively shaped by where these groups live and interact daily. Through the lens of numerous examples across the globe and drawing on a compelling combination of research techniques including field and laboratory experiments, big data analysis, and small-scale interactions, this timely book provides a new understanding of how geography shapes politics and how members of groups think about each other. Enos' analysis is punctuated with personal accounts from the field. His rigorous research unfolds in accessible writing that will appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike, illuminating the profound effects of social geography on how we relate to, think about, and politically interact across groups in the fabric of our daily lives.
“Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air.” —NPR In these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation “as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself.” Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poet’s search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America. The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography. Fathers who go missing and fathers who are distant will become the bones of the stories. There will be a fable about a giant who grew too tall to be kissed by his father. My father must have kissed me when I was boy. I can’t really say. . . . By the time I was eleven or even ten years old I was as tall as him. I was six inches taller than him by the time I was fifteen. My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache. Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; and three other award-winning poetry collections. He is the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine and also teaches at the University y of Pittsburgh. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin will also be forthcoming in 2018.
