Fiction
One of Los Angeles Times's Best Tech Books of 2023
One of San Francisco Chronicle's Favorite Books of 2023
A Climate Reality Project Book Club Pick An "intelligent, defiant" (San Francisco Chronicle) debut that follows an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel--only for it to fall in love with the novel's subject, Sen, the last human on Earth. Faced with the uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is simple: remove humans from the ecosystem. Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc's assignment is to capture Sen's life, and they set about doing this using the novels of the 21st century as a roadmap. As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen's whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own. After World is a "riveting, creepy...dazzling," (Kimberly King Parsons, award-winning author of Black Light) novel about what it means to be human in a world upended by AI and the bonds we forge with technology.
"Sublime." --Oprah Daily
"Wry, insightful and remarkable." --Scott Simon, NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don't), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn't with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette's Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.
“A marvelous and disturbing book . . . an experience both painful and joyous.”―Times Literary Supplement
The secure world of a well-established and apparently perfectly assimilated Jewish writer living in an Austrian town before World War II, disintegrates under the force of political and social realities that daily sanctify the old and endemic Austrian anti-Semitism. We learn what we learn through Bruno, the thirteen-year-old son of the family, whose spare and uninflected account discloses the slow onset of disaster. His father, a successful Austrian intellectual, refuses the implications of what’s happening and embraces the humiliating routines of Jewish self-hatred. To the vicious attacks on his writing and character, he adds his own voice until, with nothing left―not faith, not family, not dignity―he disappears. Thirty years later, the war long over, Bruno, at a low point in a childless marriage, responds to ambiguously positive inquiries about his father’s work, and travels from his home in Jerusalem to the Austrian town of his childhood. What he encounters in that town, “now clean of Jews,” means something more than confronting his own profound losses.
1st English edition; translated by Dalya Bilu. Signed by author in Hebrew. Embossed on endpaper "From the Library of David S. Ariel." Dust jacket in protective mylar cover. VG/VG
Tristan used to have it all, but now he's a broken shell of a man angrily lashing out at anyone who comes too close. He's fully prepared to be the monster everyone claims he is...until he meets a woman whose heart is just as shattered as his own. Together, they're no longer lost alone in the dark. Together, at last, they are free.
"VIVID AND BEAUTIFULLY EMOTIONAL." -ELLE KENNEDY, NYT BESTSELLING AUTHOR
I was warned about Tristan Cole.
"Stay away from him," people said. "He's cruel. He's cold. He's damaged."
It's easy to judge a man because of his past. To look at Tristan and see a monster. But I couldn't do that. I had to accept the wreckage that lived inside of him because it also lived inside of me.
We were both empty. We were both looking for something else. Something more. We both wanted to put together the shattered pieces of our yesterdays.
Then perhaps we could finally remember how to breathe.
Consistently topping BOOKTOK's "Books That Make You Ugly Cry" lists, The Air He Breathes brings the angst, the spice, and the beautifully painful longing...
THE ELEMENTS SERIES:
The Air He Breathes, book 1
The Fire Between High & Lo, book 2
The Silent Waters, book 3
The Gravity of Us, book 4
Soon she's part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But as she's finding her footing, Sunny and her friends are asked by the magical authorities to help track down a career criminal who knows magic, too. Will their training be enough to help them combat a threat whose powers greatly outnumber theirs?
World Fantasy Award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor blends magic and adventure to create a lush world. Her writing has been called "stunning" by The New York Times and her fans include Neil Gaiman, Rick Riordan, John Green, Ursula K. Le Guin, and many more!
Raves for Nnedi Okorafor's writing:
"There's more imagination on a page of Nnedi Okorafor's work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics." --Ursula K. Le Guin, award-winning author of A Wizard of Earthsea "The most imaginative, gripping, enchanting fantasy novels I have ever read!" --Laurie Halse Anderson, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Speak "I always loved science fiction, but I didn't feel I was part of it--until I read first Octavia Butler, and now Nnedi Okorafor." --Whoopi Goldberg "Highly original stuff, episode after amazing episode, full of color, life, and death. Nnedi Okorafor's work is wonderful!" --Diana Wynne Jones, award-winning author of The Chronicles of Chrestomanci "Jam-packed with mythological wonders." --Rick Riordan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series "Okorafor's imagination is stunning." --The New York Times Book Review
