A beautiful new novel on the wondrous, unfathomable nature of the human heart from the best-selling author of Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, his first since earning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Klara, an Artificial Friend with exceptional observational abilities, observes the behavior of customers who come in to shop and those who pass by on the street outside from her vantage point inside the store.

She stays optimistic that a customer would soon pick her up, but when the potential that her circumstances may alter permanently surfaces, Klara is cautioned not to put too much faith in human promises. Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Klara and the Sun examines the quickly changing modern world through the perspective of a remarkable narrator to answer a basic question: what does it mean to love?

Detailed information:
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/54120408-klara-and-the-sun

Caleb Azumah Nelson's cutting debut novel is a painful love tale among young Black artists in London. Nelson demonstrates mastery in writing youthful love, clocking the little and seemingly meaningless moments that embody desire in his protagonist, a photographer who has fallen for a dancer. Nelson honors the art that has influenced his characters' lives while examining the unfair reality that surrounds them in little over 150 intimate pages.

Two teenagers meet in a tavern in South East London. Both are Black British, both had scholarships to prestigious schools where they battled to fit in, and both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - attempting to build a name for themselves in a city that both praises and rejects them. They fall in love tentatively and lovingly. But even if two individuals appear to be intended for one other, fear and violence can tear them apart.

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Author: Caleb Azumah Nelson
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/53414230-open-water

Afterparties gives a wide depiction of the lives of Cambodian-Americans, seamlessly shifting between the ludicrous and the tenderhearted, blending biting humor with piercing emotional depth. As the children of refugees carve out radical new routes for themselves in California, they bear the burden of the Khmer Rouge massacre while grappling with the intricacies of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

A struggling grocery shop owner and high school badminton coach attempted to recreate his golden days by defeating a rising star teenage player. Two inebriated brothers attend a wedding afterparty and devise a scheme to reveal their sleazy uncle's snub of the bride and groom. An elderly software entrepreneur attempting to build a "safe place" app and a disillusioned young teacher infatuated with Moby-Dick begin a homosexual love affair. In the last narrative, a nine-year-old boy discovers that his mother survived a racist school shooter.

The stories in Afterparties provide an explosive introduction to Anthony Veasna So's writing, with delicate emotional accuracy, sharp humor, and sympathetic insight into the intimacy of LGBT and immigrant communities.

Detailed information:
Author: Anthony Veasna So
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/51733706-afterparties

Anna, a thirteen-year-old orphan, lives inside Constantinople's strong walls in a home of women who embroider priests' vestments for a job. Anna, restless and insatiably curious, learns to read and discovers a book, the narrative of Aethon, who wishes to be transformed into a bird so that he might soar to a utopian paradise in the skies. This she reads to her sick sister while the walls of Constantinople, her sole home, are bombarded during the great siege. Omeir, a country lad far from home, has been forced into the invading army alongside his beloved oxen. His and Anna's paths will intersect.

Five hundred years later, in an Idaho library, octogenarian Zeno, who studied Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five youngsters in a theatrical version of Aethon's narrative, which has survived beyond all odds. A bomb has been planted amid the library shelves by Seymour, a disturbed, idealistic adolescent. This is a new siege. In the not-too-distant future, aboard the intergalactic ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, transcribing the narrative of Aethon, recounted to her by her father, on pieces of sacking. She has never visited the world.

Detailed information:
Author: Anthony Doerr
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/56783258-cloud-cuckoo-land

Dorothy feels "like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but had lost her conviction in the intrinsic purity of the enterprise" as an adjunct professor of English in New York City with little prospect of finding a permanent appointment. Nobody, not even her therapists—Dorothy has two of them—knows she's recently suffered a miscarriage. She also can't bring herself to tell the other women in her life, including her friends, doctor, mentor, and mother. One of feminism's accomplishments is the freedom not to be a mother.

The Life of the Mind is a novel about endings: of youth, of professional goal, of potential, of the illusion that thoughts can ever liberate from the tyranny of bodies. It is piercingly intellectual and darkly hilarious. And yet, Dorothy's thinking is all she has to make sense of a world that is essentially beyond her control, a world where tragedy looms and has already arrived, a world where things happen but there is no storyline. There is a purpose, though, if Dorothy knows where to search, and as the weeks pass and the bleeding stops, she discovers it in the most unexpected locations, from a Las Vegas poolside to a homeroom singing session. As Dorothy is well aware, tales in literature come to an end. But, as they say, life goes on.

Detailed information:
Author: Christine Smallwood
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/54075354-the-life-of-the-mind

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' debut novel, longlisted for a National Book Award, is a penetrating epic that traces the tale of one American family from the colonial slave trade to the current day. The goal of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black lady coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s who is anxious to learn more about her family history, is at the heart of the film. What Ailey discovers causes her to question her identity, especially when she learns truths about her ancestors. Jeffers provides a detailed picture of class, colorism, and intergenerational trauma in 800 engrossing pages. It's an excruciating story handled with depth and compassion, one that sheds light on the price of survival.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the renowned scholar, once wrote on the American race problem and what he termed "Double Consciousness", a sensitivity that every African American requires in order to exist. Ailey Pearl Garfield has known Du Bois' words since she was a toddler. Ailey carries Du Bois's Problem on her shoulders, bearing the names of two tough Black Americans: the acclaimed choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendent of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers.

Detailed information:
Author: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/51183428-the-love-songs-of-w-e-b-du-bois

Reese had it all: a great relationship with Amy, a New York City apartment, and a job she didn't despise. She'd pieced together a life that earlier generations of trans women could only dream of: commonplace, bourgeois luxuries. The only thing that was lacking was a child. But then Amy became Ames, and everything fell apart. Reese is now stuck in a terrible cycle of avoiding loneliness by sleeping with married guys.

Ames is also dissatisfied. He felt living as a man would make his life simpler, but that decision lost his connection with Reese, and losing her meant losing his own family. Even though their romance is gone, he wishes he might find a way to reconnect with her. When Ames's employer and girlfriend, Katrina, confesses that she's pregnant with his child and isn't sure whether she wants to keep it, Ames wonders if this is the opportunity he's been looking for.

Detailed information:
Author: Torrey Peters
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/48890225-detransition-baby

A white militia drove a young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings out of her area. A university professor investigates racism by carrying out a covert sociological experiment on his own kid. A single mother who is determined to buy her first home despite the fact that the world is on the verge of disaster. Each is battling for survival in America.

Tough-minded, emotional, and bold, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's perfectly conceived debut delves into burdened ancestors and incredible quests for belonging. The eponymous novella, "My Monticello", set in the near future, depicts the story of a varied group of Charlottesville neighbors escaping deadly white extremists. They take sanctuary at Jefferson's ancient plantation house, led by Da'Naisha, a teenage Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, in a desperate bid to outlast the nation's long-foretold racial and environmental unraveling.

Detailed information:
Author: Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/56347314-my-monticello

With a lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Robert Jones, Jr. fiercely summons the voices of slavery and the enslaved alike to tell the story of these two men; from Amos the preacher to the calculating slave-master himself to the long line of women that surround them, women who have carried the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. As tensions build and the weight of centuries—of ancestors and future generations to come—culminate in a climactic reckoning, The Prophets masterfully reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.

Robert Jones, Jr. furiously summons the voices of slaver and captive alike to tell the narrative of these two men; from Amos the preacher to the calculating slave-master himself to the long line of women who surround them, people who have borne the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. The Prophets masterfully reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but it is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love, as tensions rise and the weight of centuries—of ancestors and future generations to come—culminate in a climactic reckoning.

Detailed information:
Author: Robert Jones Jr.
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/52576333-the-prophets

Marian and Jamie Graves are raised in Missoula, Montana, by their dissolute uncle after being rescued as newborns from a sinking ocean ship in 1914. Marian begins her lifelong love affair with the flight there, after witnessing a couple of barnstorming pilots traveling through town in beat-up biplanes. She drops out of school at fourteen and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.

Hadley Baxter is cast as Marian in a film about Marian's disappearance in Antarctica a century later. Hadley is ready to remake herself after a romance film trilogy has imprisoned her in the thrall of cult notoriety. She is vibrant, canny, and frustrated with the claustrophobia of Hollywood. Her absorption into Marian's character unfolds thrillingly alongside Marian's own tale, as the destinies of the two women—and their quest for self-determination in widely different geographies and times—collide. Great Circle is a gigantic work of art, epic and dramatic, thoroughly researched and gorgeously delivered, and a big leap forward for the prodigiously brilliant Maggie Shipstead.

Detailed information:
Author: Maggie Shipstead
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/54976986-great-circle