Recommended Reads Books (List)

Alexandria "Alix" Watson has learned one lesson from her barren childhood in the foster-care system: unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives...inside their favorite books.

The Librarian takes a dazzled Alix under her wing, but before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect. Aided by a dashing costume-shop owner, Alix and the Librarian flee through the Regency drawing rooms of Jane Austen to the back alleys of Sherlock Holmes and the champagne-soaked parties of The Great Gatsby as danger draws inexorably closer. But who does their enemy really wish to destroy--Alix, the Librarian, or the Library itself?

Like many other public libraries, the one in Blue Sky Valley, North Carolina, is a haven for readers. But it's also unlike any other. In this library, fictional characters step off the page into real life. Assistant librarian Stella Parker has no idea. Still reeling from her father's death and--more recently--a breakup, she hasn't noticed. All she knows is she's stuck in a job she's overqualified for and stumped about what to do with her life.

Everything changes when she burns her beloved journal.

Words matter to Stella. For as long as she can remember, she's seen them. Words appear--in varying colors and fonts--rising from surfaces, bouncing over objects, and even wiggling out of people. Words give her insight into emotions and untold stories. But the words change for Stella after she burns her journal. Suddenly they're demanding, urgent--and painful.

Then Stella stumbles upon strange characters in the library after hours. One is an oddly familiar World War II soldier who introduces himself as Jack--Jack Mathis, the main character from her favorite book. A fictional hero and Stella's first crush. Standing in front of her in the flesh. Jack tells Stella about the magic hidden in the library. Skeptical, Stella rashly invites a villain to visit, and chaos ensues. As she discovers the importance of protecting the library's secret and gets to know the real Jack, words continue to appear. What are they trying to tell her?

Much too quickly, Stella is faced with the reality that all stories must end, and magic comes at a price. The characters who visit the library can only stay for fourteen days. And Jack's time is almost up.

It can write the story of your future... and hide the secrets of your past.

The Library of Fates was designed to show you who you are--and who you could become. Its rarest book, The Book of Dark Nights, holds a secret: when you write an intimate confession on its pages, you'll receive a prediction for your future, penned in your own handwriting.

For Eleanor, whose childhood was defined by a senseless tragedy, the library offers a world where everything makes sense. She's spent most of her life there as an apprentice to the brilliant librarian, showing other people how to find the meaning of their lives in stories.

But when her mentor dies in a freak accident and The Book of Dark Nights goes missing--along with the secrets written inside--Eleanor is pulled out of the library and into a quest to locate it with the last person she expects: the librarian's estranged son, Daniel, who Eleanor once loved.

Together, as they hunt down clues from Harvard to Paris, Eleanor and Daniel grow closer again, regaining each other's trust. But little do they know that they're entangled in a much larger web. Someone else wants the book, and they'll go to dark lengths to get it...

A chronic asthma condition prevents thirteen-year-old Nanami from playing sports or spending time with her friends after school. But nothing can stop her from one of her favorite activities. Nanami loves to read and happily spends much of her free time in the library, cocooned among the stacks.

Then one day, Nanami notices that, despite the library being as deserted as ever, some of her favorite books, including literary classics like Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Thief and Anne of Green Gables are disappearing from the shelves. When she alerts the library staff, they dismiss her concerns. But just as Nanami is about to return to her reading, she spots a suspicious man in a gray suit. Eager to discover what he's up to, she follows him. The chase is cut short when Nanami suffers an asthma attack. By the time she catches her breath, the man has disappeared and all that is left behind is a mysterious light filtering through the library's familiar passageways. 

That's when Tiger, the talking tabby cat who saves books, comes to the rescue. Are Nanami and Tiger prepared to face the dangerous challenges that lie ahead in this compelling adventure story? Why are faceless gray soldiers burning books in a stone castle? And what happened to Rintaro, the socially withdrawn hero who helped Tiger save books in a second-hand bookshop? At a time of increased book bannings worldwide, Sosuke Natsukawa urges us not to underestimate the power of great literature--and to be prepared to defend our freedom to choose.

The Night Library on the outskirts of Tokyo isn't your ordinary library. It's only open from seven o'clock to midnight. It exclusively stores books by deceased authors, and none of them can be checked out -- instead, they're put on public display to be revered and celebrated by the library's visitors, akin to a book museum. Otoha Higuchi, the newest employee, has been recruited to work at the library by the mysterious anonymous owner. There, Otoha meets the other staff, comprised of former librarians and booksellers who, like her, have been damaged in some way by the rocky publishing industry - yet none of them have ever given up on their dedication to books. 

Night after night, Otoha bonds with her colleagues over meals in the library cǎf, each of which are inspired by the literature on the shelves. When strange occurrences start happening around the library that may bring the threat of closure, it forces Otoha and the library staff to rethink their entire relationship with work and what they really want in life.

Tory Van Dyne is the most down-to-earth member of a decidedly eccentric old-money New York family. For one thing, as book conservator at Manhattan’s Mystery Guild Library, she actually has a job. Plus, she’s left up-town society behind for a quiet life downtown. So she’s not thrilled when she discovers a woman in the library’s Christie Room who calmly introduces herself as Agatha Christie, politely requests a cocktail, and announces she’s there to help solve a murder— that has not yet happened. 

But as soon as Tory determines that this is just a fairly nutty Christie fangirl, her socialite/actress cousin Nicola gets caught up in the suspicious death of her less-than-lovable talent agent. Nic, as always, looks to Tory for help. Tory, in turn, looks to Mrs. Christie. The woman, whoever or whatever she is, clearly knows her stuff when it comes to crime.

Aided by an unlikely band of fellow sleuths —including a snarky librarian, an eleven-year-old computer whiz, and an NYPD detective with terrible taste in suits—Tory and the woman claiming to be her very much deceased literary idol begin to unravel the twists and turns of a murderer’s devious mind. Because, in the immortal words of Miss Jane Marple, “murder is never simple.”

On a frigid, windswept day in Scotland's Western Isles, Eleanor Bruton's body is discovered on the shore. To her family Eleanor was an ordinary middle-aged woman. She did flower arrangements and plumped kneeler cushions at church. Little did they know she was harboring a dark and all-consuming secret. A scrap of fraying embroidery that seems worthless at first glance.

For over a century, two rival organizations of women have gone to deadly lengths to secure the valuable artifact in the hopes of finding the original medieval manuscript from which it was torn. The Order of St. Katherine: devoted to the belief that women must pull strings in the shadows to exercise control. And the Fellowship of the Larks, determined to amass as many overt positions of power for women as possible...so long as their methods of doing so never come to light.

When Dr. Anya Brown garners international attention for her translation of the cryptic Folio 9, she is handpicked by Diana Cornish, a professor and high-ranking member of the Fellowship, to join the exclusive Institute of Manuscript Studies in St. Andrews. Unbeknownst to Anya she's been recruited at great personal danger to translate ancient texts that the Fellowship believes critical to their mission.

Meanwhile at Scotland Yard, Detective Constable Clio Spicer begins a private investigation into the death of Eleanor Bruton.

As all the women grow further entangled in this ancient web, circumstances spin wildly out of control and their lives may be in grave danger.

You are cordially invited to an all-expenses-paid Christmas holiday at Midwinter, a remote hamlet in the North Pennines in Yorkshire, England, to play a murder mystery game. Joining you are a has-been mystery author infamous for copycatting the classics, an out of work publicist, a disgraced influencer whose off-the-record remarks have come back to bite her, a true crime podcaster who's been sued for every penny, a former hotshot literary agent who's been sued for sexual harassment, and a publisher who used AI to plagiarize bestsellers--and was sued by Netflix. Oddly, the contestants also share a lack of any next-of-kin who might notice or care if they disappear. 

But no matter! There are cash prizes for all who see the game through to the end, and of course a high-stakes Grand Prize for the winner that no one is allowed to discuss. But it's promised to be life-altering. And then one by one, people start dying. 

A love letter to Palestinian ancestors, their descendants, and their land, to all anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, to a history that will never be forgotten, and to a future in which there thrives a free, free Palestine.

Poetry has always served as a mode of resistance in Palestinian culture. In defiance of dispossession and decades of military siege, of a nakba that never ended, of historical and cultural obfuscation, of unrelenting violence and thousands of martyred people, the "power to narrate," as Edward Said wrote, remains a necessary tool for self-determination. The poems collected here reclaim that power, bridging borders, languages, and generations to forge new conversations around resistance and liberation.

Heaven Looks Like Us is a battle-cry against the annihilation of a people. As Palestinian history remains haunted by exile, violence, and grief, so, too, are the poems in this anthology. And yet, editors George Abraham and Noor Hindi present these realities alongside other themes that are also true: queer and feminist perspectives, eco-poetry, meditations on love and time, and lineages of protest. This anthology dares to imagine a future beyond a nation-state for Palestinian people everywhere.

Following on his exquisite Stones, Kevin Young’s new collection, written over the span of sixteen years, shapes stories of loss and legacy, inspired in part by other lives. After starting in the bayous of his family's Louisiana, Young journeys to further states of mind in “All Souls,” evoking “The whale / who finds the shore / & our poor prayers.” Another central sequence, “The Two-Headed Nightingale,” is spoken by Millie-Christine McCoy, the famous conjoined African American “Carolina Twins.” Born into enslavement, stolen, and then displayed by P. T. Barnum and others, the twins later toured the world as free women, their alto and soprano voices harmonizing their own way. Young’s poem explores their evolving philosophical selfhood and pluralities: “As one we sang, /we spake— / She was the body / I the soul / Without one / Perishes the whole.”

Drawing from six previously published books--including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things--as well as vibrant new work, Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Ada Limón wades into potent unknowns--the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe--and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.

Both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet's life, this curation embodies Limón's capacity for "deep attention," her "power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires" (The New York Times). From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limón's poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.

Igniting across tongues, cultures, and countries, the incendiary poems in Burn Me Back harness the incantatory power of language through hybrid forms, preserving a beloved father's memory, enshrining the legacy of the Latino immigrant community in Washington Heights and the Bronx, reimagining the world we share, and speaking toward a hopeful multiplicity of possible futures. 

María Auxiliadora Álvarez's winning entry of the Paz Prize for Poetry is in many ways a loving memoriam to her father, Oswaldo Álvarez Rojas, and a celebration of the long embrace that still warms María, her seven siblings, and their mother. Her poems explore sunlight as a metaphor for her father, holding her up from behind, illuminating her path forward, and also shining a light on memory, igniting nostalgia, and overcoming the grief of loss.

Between 1960 and 1975, thousands of Haitian professionals emigrated to Congo, a fellow Black francophone nation that emerged under the revolutionary new leadership of Patrice Lumumba. As Danielle Legros Georges writes in the introduction to this collection, these émigrés sought to “escape repression in Haiti, start new lives in Africa, and participate in a decolonizing Congo.” Among them were her parents.

Grounded in these personal and social histories, Three Leaves, Three Roots is a collection of Legros Georges’s creative reconstructions of the Haiti-Congo experience. She interweaves her verses with excerpts from primary sources such as the interviews she conducted with the Congo émigrés and letters written by people both famous and obscure, including Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and members of Legros Georges’s family.

The result is a richly layered portrayal of an era of decolonization and rebuilding, a time that sparked with both promise and vulnerability for the Pan-Africanist and Black Power movements. This collection is an important work of Haitian American poetry and of Black history: it reminds us, artfully, that movements of solidarity among people of color have always existed and always will exist.

June is a brilliant but difficult girl with a gift for mechanical invention who leaves home to begin astronaut training at the National Space Program. Younger by two years than her classmates at Peter Reed, the school on campus named for her uncle, she flourishes in her classes but struggles to make friends. Six years later, she has gained a coveted post as an engineer on a space station, but is haunted by the mystery of Inquiry, a revolutionary spacecraft powered by her beloved late uncle’s fuel cells. The spacecraft went missing when she was twelve years old, and June alone has evidence that they may still be alive.

Expendable: a human clone utilized for dangerous work on space exploration missions. An Expendable's personality and memories may be transferred to a new body if and when the current host dies. 

Mickey Barnes is an Expendable, now on his 7th iteration, among his fellow colonists on the near-uninhabitable ice world of Niflheim. While on reconnaissance, Mickey7 is injured and left for dead, only to be saved by Niflheim's native species, thought to be insentient. Mickey7 doesn't know how all of his previous selves died, but those he remembers have left him traumatized and mistrustful of the colony's mission. 

Ambrose wakes up on the Coordinated Endeavor, with no memory of a launch. There’s more that doesn’t add up: Evidence indicates strangers have been on board, the ship’s operating system is voiced by his mother, and his handsome, brooding shipmate has barricaded himself away. But nothing will stop Ambrose from making his mission succeed - not when he’s rescuing his own sister. In order to survive the ship’s secrets, Ambrose and Kodiak will need to work together and learn to trust one another… especially once they discover what they are truly up against. 

July 25th, 2234: The crew of the Adamura discovers the anomaly.

On the seemingly uninhabited planet Talos VII: a circular pit, 50 kilometers wide.

Its curve not of nature, but design.

Now, a small team must land and journey on foot across the surface to learn who built the hole and why.

But they all carry the burdens of lives carved out on disparate colonies in the cruel cold of space.

For some the mission is the dream of the lifetime, for others a risk not worth taking, and for one it is a desperate attempt to find meaning in an uncaring universe.

Each step they take toward the mysterious abyss is more punishing than the last.

And the ghosts of their past follow.

It's the dawn of a new era - and we're ready to colonize Mars. Frank - father, architect, murderer - is recruited for a mission to Mars with the promise of a better life, along with seven of his most notorious fellow inmates. But as his crew sets to work on the red wasteland of Mars, the accidents mount up, and Frank begins to suspect they might not be accidents at all. As the list of suspect grows shorter, it's up to Frank to uncover the terrible truth before it's too late.

In this near future, our world is at war with another, and humanity is haunted by its one catastrophic loss - a nightmarish engagement that left a handful of survivors drifting home through space. The military-industrial complex set its sights on a new goal: zero-casualty warfare, made possible by gleaming new ships called Providences, powered by AI. But when the latest-launched Providence suffers a surprising attack and contact with home is severed, astronauts Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson must confront the truth of the war they're fighting.

Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship - all specialists in their own fields - as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes - and that's when things begin to fall apart.

The last thing Sanda remembers is her gunship breaking up around her as her preserving pod expanded, sealing herself away for salvage-medics to pick up. She expected to awaken in friendly hands, patched up and patched back into a new gunship. Instead, she awakens 230 years later upon an empty enemy smartship, The Light of Berossus or, as he prefers to be called, “Bero”. The war is lost. The star system is dead. However, Bero may not exactly be telling the whole truth.

Murakami is just your average college student--he attends class, goes to work, and plays games on his days off. And it's a day like any other when he comes across a stray in the park near his apartment. But instead of a cute, fluffy friend, Murakami finds himself face-to-face with...a real-life dragon?! Its name is Ilsera, and it's on a journey to become a full-fledged member of its species! It has only one request: that he foster it during its time in the human world. How will Murakami handle having such a strange new roommate...?

From the ashes of the Krakoan era, a new age begins for the young mutants of the Big Apple!

This isn't a book about X-Men. This is a book about mutants living past the end of their world and into a new beginning. This is Ms. Marvel embracing her mutant life in the neon streets of the Lower East Side. This is Anole trying to keep his head above water. This is Wolverine in the shadows of Bushwick, protecting her own. This is Prodigy writing history as it happens - and Sophie Cuckoo finding her own way. But the news reports are bleak. The streets feel dangerous. There's something lurking underground. Evil coming from every direction. Nevertheless, they're determined to make it. This is mutant community. This is mutant pride. This is NYX!

COLLECTING- NYX (2024) 1-5

A fiend who slays his own kind. A magical girl who refuses the script. A tale of light and shadow intertwined.

Tanpopo Ohanami’s quiet days are interrupted by a life-changing offer to become a magical girl! But she has one big, bad, serrated-toothed secret: Her best friend, Shade, is a fiend in a world where fiends are villains to humankind.

Shade is none too pleased with the idea of Tanpopo joining the ranks, but there’s more than their friendship at stake when Tanpopo’s grandpa falls victim to fiendhood!

Comic book superstars Mariko Tamaki and Skylar Patridge team up to take Supergirl on a mysterious deep space mission only she can handle!

This looks like a job for...Supergirl! And only Supergirl.

The details of her mission are a secret to even herself, other than she is to escort an alien convict to prison and that Superman trusted only her with this quest. Quickly, things spiral out of control- she must save the kidnapped judge of the United Planets' highest court and pursue an assassin, but she finds herself imprisoned!

All of that is before she's face-to-face with the prisoner she was tasked with escorting-presenting Supergirl with an impossible choice! Who's really pulling the strings? And how will Supergirl get home from the far reaches of space?

Mariko Tamaki, the award-winning writer of Roaming and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, returns to Supergirl alongside dazzling artists Skylar Patridge and Meghan Hetrick for this emotional and heady science fiction epic!

This volume collects stories from Action Comics #1070-1081 and Supergirl Special #1.

In her raw and resonant debut novel, René Peña-Govea seamlessly interweaves prose and poetry to uplift the power of language, the courage to fight injustice, and the complex beauty of finding your people--perfect for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X and Carolina Ixta's Shut Up, This is Serious.

Estela Morales is one of the only Latinas who tested into San Francisco's most exclusive public high school. In her senior year, Estela just wants to keep her head down, eke out a passing grade from her racist Spanish teacher, and get into her dream college.

But after placing second in the Latiné Heritage Poetry Contest behind a non-Latino student, Estela is thrust into citywide debates about merit, identity, and diversity.

Things only get messier when her family is threatened with eviction. As Estela's friends organize against bigotry and her landlady increases the pressure, Estela is suffocating and finds release only in poetry and in a breathless new romance. When tensions finally reach their breaking point, Estela must find a way to undrown the community she loves--and herself.

“An absolutely delightful romp that you need in your life.” —C. B. Lee, New York Times bestselling author of Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe 

A teen mystic will do anything to solve a series of love-related magical mishaps plaguing her high school, including fake dating her boss's daughter, in this charming sapphic romance.

Magic lingers in the cozy town of Fair Glen, Illinois, and it’s up to the agents at the Bureau of Mystical Affairs to keep it in check. Monroe Bennett, a junior recruit at the Bureau, is ready to ace her first assignment: tracking down the source of a rogue love charm.

Protecting her charmed classmates, including the Bureau Director’s daughter Iris James, is top priority. But when Iris asks Monroe to fake date her to make her ex jealous, things get complicated. 

Monroe believes in duty, not romance. Yet the more time she spends with Iris, the harder it is to ignore the very real sparks flying between them. Can Monroe protect herself from love long enough to solve this case, or will her growing feelings get in the way?

Two teen boys grapple with identity and accountability and set off a ripple effect within their community after a school assembly is disrupted by a shouted slur.

★"[A] searing, deeply felt dual-POV novel," —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Freshmen Dayton and Farshid couldn’t be more different—or so it seems.

When Dayton takes a dare and shouts the f-slur at a visiting author during a school event, it sets off a chain reaction that forces both boys to face parts of themselves they’d rather ignore.

Dayton, grappling with the fallout of his actions, faces rejection from his friends, disappointment from his parents, and a growing awareness of the harm he’s caused. Meanwhile, Farshid is left to untangle his own feelings—about himself and about the quiet struggle of coming to terms with his queerness in a world steeped in heteronormativity.

As their lives unexpectedly intersect, Dayton and Farshid must reckon with what kind of men they want to become and whether they have the courage to defy toxic masculinity and societal expectations.

Timely, raw, and deeply thought-provoking, this novel is perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds and Nic Stone.

In her raw and resonant debut novel, René Peña-Govea seamlessly interweaves prose and poetry to uplift the power of language, the courage to fight injustice, and the complex beauty of finding your people--perfect for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X and Carolina Ixta's Shut Up, This is Serious.

Estela Morales is one of the only Latinas who tested into San Francisco's most exclusive public high school. In her senior year, Estela just wants to keep her head down, eke out a passing grade from her racist Spanish teacher, and get into her dream college.

But after placing second in the Latiné Heritage Poetry Contest behind a non-Latino student, Estela is thrust into citywide debates about merit, identity, and diversity.

Things only get messier when her family is threatened with eviction. As Estela's friends organize against bigotry and her landlady increases the pressure, Estela is suffocating and finds release only in poetry and in a breathless new romance. When tensions finally reach their breaking point, Estela must find a way to undrown the community she loves--and herself.

Two teen boys grapple with identity and accountability and set off a ripple effect within their community after a school assembly is disrupted by a shouted slur.

★"[A] searing, deeply felt dual-POV novel," —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Freshmen Dayton and Farshid couldn’t be more different—or so it seems.

When Dayton takes a dare and shouts the f-slur at a visiting author during a school event, it sets off a chain reaction that forces both boys to face parts of themselves they’d rather ignore.

Dayton, grappling with the fallout of his actions, faces rejection from his friends, disappointment from his parents, and a growing awareness of the harm he’s caused. Meanwhile, Farshid is left to untangle his own feelings—about himself and about the quiet struggle of coming to terms with his queerness in a world steeped in heteronormativity.

As their lives unexpectedly intersect, Dayton and Farshid must reckon with what kind of men they want to become and whether they have the courage to defy toxic masculinity and societal expectations.

Timely, raw, and deeply thought-provoking, this novel is perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds and Nic Stone.

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The gods are dead. All that’s left are the Players...

The performers of the Playhouse are as worshipped as they are feared, their enchanting shows bending hearts, minds, and even reality itself. Vicious, godlike, lethal. Eighteen-year-old Riven Hesper knows the dangers better than anyone, after her own encounter with a Player resulted in a curse that is slowly killing her.

When the Playhouse announces the spectacle of a lifetime—a chance for one mortal to steal a Player’s immortality—Riven sees her last chance to live. Desperate for answers, she infiltrates the competition. There, she finds Jude, the Playhouse’s brilliant, merciless Lead Player, whose charm is as dangerous as his Craft, and strikes a deadly bargain to save her life.

But with time running out and the Playhouse’s secrets unraveling into a disturbing picture, Riven faces a grim possibility: she might not be the hero of her story after all. In fact, she may be the villain.

Because the Playhouse doesn’t just tell stories. It rewrites them.

And Riven’s might end in blood.

Caraval meets One Dark Window in this lush and dark romantasy.

***Don’t miss out on the stunning DELUXE LIMITED EDITION while supplies last. This breathtaking collectible is only available on a limited first print run in the US and Canada only, a must-have for any book lover.

A chaotic comedy of high school courtship between an awkward girl and a dorky boy too dense to realize they are already in love with each other.

Akira returns to the countryside for high school with a foolproof scheme to win the heart of her childhood crush, Hajime. Too bad they’re both fools in love!

Highlights of Akira’s carefully orchestrated strategy to court Hajime include covering his eyes with her hands, tricking him into saying her name, and making his heart race. But she might have better luck impressing him with her academic and athletic prowess. Or not. Because he’s too dense to figure out she likes him. And she’s too dense to figure out he likes her back!

Award-winning and critically acclaimed author Candace Fleming presents the edge-of-your-seat true story of the search for Tutankhamun's tomb, the Western public's belief that the dig was cursed, and the battle for ownership of the treasures within.

Scholastic Focus is the premier home of thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and thoughtfully designed works of narrative nonfiction aimed at middle-grade and young adult readers. These books help readers learn about the world in which they live and develop their critical thinking skills so that they may become dynamic citizens who are able to analyze and understand our past, participate in essential discussions about our present, and work to grow and build our future.

During the reign of the New Kingdom of Egypt, the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun ruled and died tragically young. In order to send him on his way into the afterlife, his tomb was filled with every treasure he would need after death. And then, it was lost to time, buried in the sands of the Valley of the Kings.

His tomb was also said to be cursed.

Centuries later, as Egypt-mania gripped Europe, two Brits -- a rich earl with a habit for gambling and a disreputable, determined archeologist -- worked for years to rediscover and open Tutankhamun's tomb. But once it was uncovered, would ancient powers take their revenge for disturbing and even looting the pharaoh's resting place? What else could explain the mysterious illnesses, accidents, and deaths that began once it was found?

Featuring clear instructions, detailed stitch diagrams, and stunning photography, this volume ensures that you have all the tools you need to embark on your crochet adventure with confidence. Expand your skills, learn new techniques, and watch your crochet expertise grow throughout the year.

So many interesting basketry designs can be made from plant leaves and bark that you can find in nature or purchase from suppliers. Learn how to harvest these materials and use the basic materials and weaving techniques to make projects ranging from traditional baskets to wall hangings to a shoulder bag, pencil cup, Christmas decorations, and much more.

Transform items in your home into beautiful works of art! Eye-catching and a lot of fun to do, mosaics will help you transform almost any space into a stunning work of art. You can spruce up your home, both indoors and outdoors, with colorful accents and unique mosaic designs. Beginner's Guide to Making Mosaics is your introductory guide to mosaic tiles for crafts that covers everything from window sills, walls, and coffee tables to flower pots, picture frames, trays, and more decorative pieces. The 16 easy projects come with supply lists, step-by-step instructions, high-quality photography, and helpful tips. Also included is everything you need to know about the materials, tools, and techniques you'll use to make your own colorful works of art with mosaics. 

Embroider the beauty of nature. A complete guide to adding studding textures, colors, patterns, and other eye-catching details to your hand-stitched projects, this must-have book is a beautiful, skill-building resource for embroidery enthusiasts of any skill level! You'll experiment with printed fabrics and unique stitches in this exciting new approach to embroidery. Featuring studding hoop projects inspired by landscapes--from the mountain ranges of Washington and the desert arches of Utah to the hidden beach coves of Mexico and the tropical waterfalls of Hawaii--these designs will help you take your embroidery skills to the next level and capture the art, patterns, and textures of nature, one stitch at a time!

From setting up your machine and exploring different stitches to learning how to hem and create beautiful projects, Jessica Shaw has all the know-how you need to master your sewing machine. Jessica’s approachable instructions make it easy to learn new skills, like crafting simple repairs to worn-out clothing, adding embellishments, and tips for sewing on different fabric types. Beginner projects are included. 

Needle felting is an increasingly popular craft because it can be used to create almost anything! This book has everything you need to know to make your very own three-dimensional needle felted sculptures. Featuring 10 step-by-step projects to get you started, ranging from toadstools and teacups to puffins and mice, learn how to create your very own sculptures.

Nicki Trench, one of the leading figures in the revival and promotion of home crafts, has designed a series of patterns that will guide you from the initial crochet stitches to producing beautiful projects incorporating a wide range of techniques. Includes 35 easy-to-follow patterns that will teach you how to crochet as you go along.

Handmade cards are gifts, creative expressions, keepsakes, and relationship builders. This volume contains information on a variety of paper-crafting techniques, including a comprehensive description of paper types available, folding options and techniques, coloring and image transfer methods, and adding embellishments. More than 80 projects are included. 

Written by a passionate stitcher and teacher eager to produce a one-stop sewing bible for her students, this book leaves no hem unturned. This comprehensive reference volume contains guidance on tools, stitches, techniques, and patterns, all of which are sharply photographed, carefully annotated, and clearly explained. It also contains 25 home décor and clothing projects. 

Sometimes referred to as a smash or junk journal, scrapbooking can be used to create collages of your favorite themes, record moments or ideas, or keep a lasting record of memorabilia. Discover all the inside tricks and tips of scrapbooking in this volume. Packed with inspirations and practical know-how, you'll soon be hooked on this hobby that expresses your creativity and relaxes your mind and body at the same time.

This step-by-step guide by an experienced calligraphy teacher allows you to develop your skills progressively. Master calligrapher Maki Shimano shows you all the techniques and provides hundreds of colorful examples to inspire you. She also provides dozens of ideas for decorative motifs such as wreaths, balloons, birthday cakes, and more!

Embroidery is an ancient craft that has been enjoyed and practiced for centuries, providing crafters with a relaxing and mindful activity to create beautiful works of art using needlepoint and fabric. In this book, embroidery expert Rosemary Drysdale adds a new twist with a delightful collection of projects which use buttons in an innovative and creative way.

Herbs in Every Season offers gardeners, herbalists, cooks, and homesteaders a new way of looking at herbs throughout the year. Herbalists will learn how an herb's growth habits inform its medicinal capabilities, and gardeners will gain insight on herbs as integral culinary plants for the kitchen garden, pollinator plants for perennial borders, and key ingredients for a home apothecary. ​With detailed plant profiles, Bevin Cohen encourages a year-round perspective on growing and using herbs in tandem with the seasons. He assures any newcomer that herbs are not only easy to grow, but also forgiving. Readers will take delight in: 

·Simple, homegrown recipes and preservation techniques for tonics, teas, meals, and treats

·Herbal remedies and useful DIY applications for common ailments such as sunburns and mosquito bites

·Deep insight on how the life cycle of an herb contributes to its medicinal and culinary properties

·How a seasonal herbal approach can provide a much-needed process of cyclical re-connection to the earth

The earth is not a dead, mute landscape but an eloquent, living being. Sometimes it just takes a spade, a packet of seeds, and a pair of sturdy boots to realize it.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns, and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself to daily gardening in all weathers. For Han, gardening is a form of silent meditation, a lingering in stillness. It gives you a different sense of time. Every plant has its own time that is specific to it, and the garden is a space in which these multiple temporalities overlap and cut across one another. The longer he worked in the garden, the more respect he developed for the earth and for its enchanting beauty.

Gardening taught him what care for others means. Each organism has its own consciousness of time passing; each organism lives in its own micro-universe. Step by step, Han receded from himself and the world, moving closer and closer to an exuberant, divine nature which we are increasingly in danger of losing.

Through this rich meditation on plants, soil, gardening, and time, Han unfolds a way of relating to and tending the earth that is in sharp contrast to the brutal, incessant exploitation of our planet that we see all around us today.

The second book in the American Horticultural Society’s series of growing guides, Essential Guide to Perennial Gardening is a comprehensive and modern guide to cultivating and caring for perennial plants, including many perennials native to North America. Whether you grow in full sun or a shady corner, in a small space or a large landscape, the insight and guidance offered by the experts at AHS ensure you’ll have a thriving, bloom-filled garden. Included inside: 

• Strategies for designing the perennial garden of your dreams or incorporating perennials into an existing garden 
• Advice on selecting the best perennials for your climate and design style
• Techniques for fostering a robust and adaptable garden that requires lower maintenance 
• Eco-friendly approaches to managing pests and diseases 
• Information on routine perennial plant-care tasks such as dividing, pruning, pinching, staking, and fertilizing
• Insight on garden maintenance methods that do not negatively impact pollinators and other wildlife
• Over 150 perennial plant profiles with photographs and specific care advice 

This complete and contemporary manual contains all the information you need to grow perennials successfully in the face of today’s many gardening challenges, including weather extremes, invasive pests, water-use restrictions, and other such trials. Its modern approach to perennial gardening focuses on treating the garden as an ecosystem that depends less on human interference and more on natural resiliency.

Rooted in twenty practical steps that anyone can take starting today, Grass Isn't Greener demonstrates how small changes in your yard or garden can create lasting impact for the planet: from leaving your leaves to selecting eco-friendly holiday decorations; from eliminating light pollution to attracting wildlife; from saving seeds to devoting even a small patch of lawn to native plants. With easy-to-follow advice and real-life examples, conservation educator Danae Wolfe will help you appreciate the new life you've attracted to your yard. A companion for new homeowners, renters, and gardeners, Grass Isn't Greener is a resource for anyone looking for little ways to make a big difference--and to have fun doing it.

Inside this home gardening book, author Linda Gray steers you through every step of planning indoor and outdoor gardens, from propagating and growing to using and preserving herbs and spices. This isn't a one-size-fits-all guide! It's a comprehensive resource to discover what fits your unique space and climate. You'll discover plant-specific advice to target the best possible additions to your garden, including strategies for selecting which herbs and spices to grow, prepping your space at home, and designing to maximize your space. Each plant profile explains the specific challenges and advantages of each plant and how to select the best for your climate, along with growing, planting, and harvesting advice, as well as how to use each herb and spice in food.

In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, Jewish and female citizens were forced out of their academic positions. Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer and Hildegard Stücklen were eminent in their fields, but they had no choice but to flee due to their Jewish ancestry or anti-Nazi sentiments.

Their harrowing journey out of Germany became a life-and-death situation that required Herculean efforts of friends and other prominent scientists. Lise fled to Sweden, where she made a groundbreaking discovery in nuclear physics, and the others fled to the United States, where they brought advanced physics to American universities. No matter their destination, each woman revolutionized the field of physics when all odds were stacked against them, galvanizing young women to do the same.

After stealing the spotlight as a teenaged Broadway performer during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Josephine then took Paris by storm, dazzling audiences across the Roaring Twenties. In her famous banana skirt, she enraptured royalty and countless fans—Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso among them. She strolled the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah wearing a diamond collar. With her signature flapper bob and enthralling dance moves, she was one of the most recognizable women in the world.

When World War II broke out, Josephine became a decorated spy for the French Résistance. Her celebrity worked as her cover, as she hid spies in her entourage and secret messages in her costumes as she traveled. She later joined the Civil Rights movement in the US, boycotting segregated concert venues, and speaking at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr. 

First published in France in 1949, her memoir will now finally be published in English. At last we can hear Josephine in her own voice: charming, passionate, and brave. Her words are thrilling and intimate, like she’s talking with her friends over after-show drinks in her dressing room. Through her own telling, we come to know a woman who danced to the top of the world and left her unforgettable mark on it.

In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America’s most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country’s canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racial identity—these “Africanist” presences are “the shadow that makes light possible,” as Morrison writes, and the reflections of their authors’ own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings.

With profound erudition and wit, Morrison breaks wide open the American conception of race with energetic, enlivening readings of the nation’s canon, revealing that our liberation from these diminishing notions comes through language. “How,” Morrison wonders, “could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, or progress, of suffragism, or Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands . . . of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants?”

The ongoing struggle for women’s rights has spanned human history, touched nearly every culture on Earth, and encompassed a wide range of issues, such as the right to vote, work, get an education, own property, exercise bodily autonomy, and beyond. Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists is a fun and fascinating graphic novel–style primer that covers the key figures and events that have advanced women’s rights from antiquity to the modern era. In addition, this compelling book illuminates the stories of notable women throughout history—from queens and freedom fighters to warriors and spies—and the progressive movements led by women that have shaped history, including abolition, suffrage, labor, civil rights, LGBTQ liberation, reproductive rights, and more. 

When fifteen-year-old Ella Fitzgerald's mother dies at the height of the Depression in 1932, the teenager goes to work for the mob to support herself and her family. When the law finally catches up, the "ungovernable" adolescent is incarcerated in the New York Training School for Girls in upstate New York--a wicked prison infamous for its harsh treatment of inmates, especially Black ones. Determined to be free, Ella escapes and makes her way back to Harlem, where she is forced to dance for pennies on the street.

Looking for a break into show business, Ella draws straws to appear at the Apollo Theater's Amateur Night on November 21, 1934. Rather than perform a dance routine directly after "The World Famous Edwards Sisters" number, the homeless Ella, wearing men's galoshes a size too big, risks everything when she decides to sing Judy instead. Four years later, at barely twenty-one, Ella Fitzgerald has become the bestselling female vocalist in America.

Compelling and rich in historical detail, Ella is a remarkable debut novel about an extraordinary woman.

1930s, New York City: An ambitious Harlem woman's husband upends her social climbing when he buys a Negro Leagues baseball team and appoints her as the team's business manager. Overnight, Effa Manley goes from 125th Street's civil rights champion to an interloper in the boys' club that is professional baseball.

Navigating her way through gentlemen's agreement contracts, the very public flirtatious antics of superstar Satchel Paige, and a sports world that would much rather see this woman back in her "place" at home, Effa ultimately whips her team, the Newark Eagles, into the Negro Leagues Champions of 1946. But how long will she get to enjoy the fruits of her success before Major League Baseball tears it all apart.

Based on the incredible life of Effa Manley, an unforgettable and inspiring story about a woman with a dream who wound up with a baseball team.

In 1952, Norma Jeane Baker follows documentary photographer Eve Arnold into a powder room on the night they first meet. She has a proposition for her. Norma Jeane created Marilyn Monroe to be photographed, and she wants Eve to do it. Eve is better than anyone she’s seen at revealing a person’s inner truth. Together they can help each other. Together, she says, they can make something brilliant.

Skeptical of this cipher of a young woman, Eve demurs. She’s looking for more serious subjects than this ambitious starlet. But she keeps getting drawn back into Marilyn’s orbit, and the women come to recognize something in each other—something fundamental. Nothing will get in the way of what they want, and when Marilyn’s star takes off to teetering heights, neither will ever be the same.

Harlem, 1943. At just twenty-three, Hazel Scott is a woman on fire. A jazz prodigy, a glamorous film star, and a fierce advocate for civil rights, she's breaking barriers and refusing to play by the rules. Then Adam Clayton Powell Jr. walks into her life. Harlem's most electrifying preacher-turned-politician, Adam is as bold and unyielding as Hazel--charismatic, powerful...and married.

This kicks off a decades-long relationship that propels them into the center of a political and cultural revolution. As Hazel's star rises, Adam takes the national stage in Congress and the couple becomes the toast of the country. But when their affair turns into a marriage, behind the glamorous façade is a battlefield of ego, ambition, and sacrifice. Forced to choose between her music and her family, Hazel must decide what she's willing to lose--and what she refuses to give up.

At seventeen, Alice Marble has no formal tennis skills and no coach. What she does have is an ability to hit the ball as hard as she can and a strong desire to prove herself. With steadfast determination and one sacrifice after another, Alice plays her heart out on the courts of the rich and famous, at national tournaments, and--the greatest of them all--at Wimbledon, rising to be one of the top-ranked players in the world.

But then her world falls apart.

With the outbreak of war with Germany, Alice's tennis career and life come to a screeching halt, and for the first time, she is forced to confront who she is without tennis. As she seeks to understand her new place in the world and how she can aid in the war efforts, a telegram arrives with devastating news from overseas. Heartbroken and lost, she feels like she can only watch as the war wreaks havoc in every area of her life.

Until an unexpected invitation arrives.

Alice is given the chance to fight back when the US Army sends her a request: Under the guise of playing in tennis exhibition games in Switzerland, she would be a spy for them. Alice aches for nothing more than to avenge what the war has taken from her and to prove herself against this new opponent. But what awaits her might be her greatest challenge yet.

The adventure is over but life goes on for an elf mage just beginning to learn what living is all about.

Elf mage Frieren and her courageous fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land. But Frieren will long outlive the rest of her former party. How will she come to understand what life means to the people around her?

Decades after their victory, the funeral of one her friends confronts Frieren with her own near immortality. Frieren sets out to fulfill the last wishes of her comrades and finds herself beginning a new adventure…

Turns out that the 'magical powers' are actually a thing, and Mari is next up to wield them. Freshman year is gonna be a doozy.

Before starting college, Mari Jiwe's relatives gift her an ancestral totem, once fabled to give its wearer the powers of the animal kingdom. Mari just chalks its 'magical powers' up to superstition.

After arriving in New York City, though, she definitely notices something strange about her new home. Especially the animals. While Mari battles staying awake in class and feral subway rats, dark plans emerge from the corners of the vast metropolis. Girls who look just like her start going missing and Mari can't shake the feeling that she's next.

As for the totem? Turns out that the 'magical powers' are actually a thing, and Mari is next up to wield them. Freshman year is gonna be a doozy.

In a world where only women can be witches, one unsuspecting boy acquires their power.

Magic is alive and well in the world, inside beings known as Majiks. By completing a Majik’s trial, a Witch can gain its power. However, only women can become Witches or use magical items. All that changes one day when a young man named Ichi turns the world on its head by defeating an infamous Majik and gaining its magical powers!

Ichi is a reclusive hunter who knows nothing of Witches and Majiks, but he does have a particular obsession for hunting anything that exudes bloodlust. When that instinct leads him to interfere in a battle between the great Witch Desscaras and the horrifying King Majik Uroro, against all odds, he acquires the destructive magic of Uroro, making him the only male Witch in the entire world! And not even Desscaras herself is prepared for the absolute headache that wild child Ichi is about to give her.

Sori Lee is hoping for a fresh start at her new school--which is easier said than done when every single thing reminds her of why she transferred. As luck would have it, an anonymous letter taped to the bottom of her desk provides a perfect distraction. Little does Sori know that she's about to embark on the scavenger hunt of a lifetime! What starts off as simple curiosity becomes a healing journey as Sori discovers just how far a small act of kindness can go.

"Where would you like to travel? The aquarium, the amusement park, the great outdoors, the hot springs… Make a plan and pack your little bag! The cute kitties of Mofusand have conquered Japan and now, they're taking a trip! Incredible illustrator Juno brings the lives and travels of these cats to life in Falling In Love with a Traveling Cat!"

Three starred reviews!

In this “beautifully executed victory lap” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) to Jason Reynolds’s award-winning and New York Times bestselling Track series, meet Coach as a boy striving to come into his own as a track star while facing upheaval at home.

Before Coach was the man who gave caring yet firm-handed guidance to Ghost, Lu, Patina, and Sunny on the Defenders track team, he was little Otie Brody, who was obsessed with Mr. 9.99 (a.k.a. Carl Lewis) and Marty McFly from Back to the Future. Like Mr. 9.99—and his own dad—Otie is a sprinter. Sprint free or die is practically his motto. 

Then his dad, who is always away on business trips, comes home with a pair of Jordans. JORDANS. Fine as fine can be. Otie puts them on and feels like he can leap to the moon…maybe even leap like Mr. 9.99 when he won the Olympic gold medal in the long jump. But one morning he wakes up to find his brand-new secret weapon kicks are missing—right off his feet! And Otie just might have a fuzzy memory of his dad easing them off as Otie was sleeping, but that can’t be right, can it?

Unless all the reasons for his dad’s “gone’s” are very different from what he’s been told… Because now, not only are the Jordans missing, but so is his father.

There once was a village so far north that most considered it the top of the world... and in that village, the Sun fell in love with her Starmaker. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Nature of Witches comes a whimsical and sweeping romantic fantasy.

Nestled deep in the snowy mountains of the Lost Range, the village of Reverie is a small miracle. Beyond the reach of the Sun, Reverie is dependent upon the magic of the mysterious Starmaker: every morning, he trudges across a vast glacier and pulls in sunlight over the peaks, providing the village with the light it needs to survive.

Aurora Finch grew up on tales of the Starmaker's magic, never imagining she'd one day meet him. But on the morning of her wedding, a fateful encounter in the frostbitten woods changes everything. The Starmaker senses a powerful magic within her and demands she come study under his guidance. With her newfound abilities tied to the survival of the village, Aurora is swept away to his ice-covered castle and far from everything she's ever known.

The Starmaker is as cold and distant as the mountain itself, leaving Aurora to explore his enchanted castle alone. Yet the more she discovers about the sorcerer, the stronger their attraction grows, pulling her closer to the secrets he refuses to share. But a deadly frost approaches and Aurora must uncover what the Starmaker is hiding before she is left in an endless winter that even the Sun cannot touch.

Rival groups of local and wealthy teens in a small Everglades town confront the secrets that rise from the waters in the wake of a hurricane in this sizzling and suspenseful thriller from New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Young—perfect for fans of Outer Banks and The White Lotus.

Some secrets won’t stay buried. Not even in the Everglades.

Deep in the Everglades, there was once a luxurious and legendary hotel enjoyed by the wealthy elite. Until one mysterious night when a fire tore through the building, killing a young socialite and casting blame on a local dock worker. Soon after, the hotel vanished, swallowed up by the wetlands like it never existed at all. 

Until now.

When a powerful hurricane unearths the ruins of the long-forgotten hotel, the past is dragged back to the surface as clues to the devasting truth about the night of the fire are revealed. 

It’s the truth that die-hard local Noa and her friends have been chasing for years in the hopes of clearing their ancestor’s name and pushing back against the rich families trying to force them out. With the help of Jamie, the rebellious son of a wealthy businessman, Noa and her crew begin a desperate fight for the justice they deserve. 

It won’t be easy. Because the wealthy control just about everything on Paradise Coast—including the truth. And they will do whatever it takes, even kill, to make sure the past stays buried.

Fame meets Rent in this powerful YA debut about a boy who must reconcile with his identity and insecurity as he steps into the spotlight, from Broadway star Andrew Keenan-Bolger.

The only thing standing between Danny and his dreams is…everything.

For fifteen years, Danny Victorio has kept his head down, kept his mouth shut, and kept everyone out. But an audition for Manhattan’s most prestigious arts school offers him a chance to escape Staten Island—and his crumbling family—for good.

If he doesn’t screw everything up.

At LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts, Danny is thrust into a world of fierce talent and even fiercer ambition. As he navigates overwhelming expectations, the ghosts of his past, and, for the first time, real friendship, Danny can’t shake the question: Where do I belong…if I belong at all? 

Set against the gritty, vibrant backdrop of 1996 New York City—where peep-show palaces were giving way to Disney stores, “Club Kids” ruled the nightlife scene, and a new musical called Rent was driving teens to sleep on the seediest sidewalks of Times Square in hopes of a ticket—Limelight is a story about discovering your voice, finding your family, and figuring out who, and where, you’re really meant to be.

8 HOURS TO STOP AN EXPLOSION...8 HOURS TO FALL IN LOVE.
From the New York Times bestselling co-author of Illuminae and Aurora Rising comes a high-stakes, high-chemistry, sci-fi romp about a stowaway girl and the richest boy in the galaxy, racing the clock to outwit a gang of mercenaries.

It’s 2067, and the Graves family has transformed Mars from a lifeless rock into a chaotic patch of settlements. You can buy a one-way ticket to a new life--if you're rich.

Enter Hunter Graves, the handsome, ambitious grandson of the man who settled Mars. With spectacularly bad timing, Hunter arrives at the United Nations base just as an emergency evacuation sends everyone scurrying for safety. Except he’s left behind. Uh-oh. 

Also stranded: Cleo, a sharp-tonged stowaway with no intention of dying today, and even less patience for overconfident trust fund boys. But the enemy of your enemy might just help you survive, so here we are.

It turns out the evacuation is just a cover for the mercenaries who come next, and the plan to blow up the base--and every trace of their crime--in eight hours.

Now, Hunter and Cleo have one shot to stop the explosion, escape alive, and deal with the inconvenient fact that they're falling for each other.

The clock is ticking.

It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people's interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, and the changing climate.

In 2015, a team of researchers carefully removed a plastic straw from a sea turtle's nostril off the coast of Costa Rica. The disturbing incident, which was captured on video, went viral, leading to corporate straw bans around the world. In this evocative book, reminiscent of Jane Goodall's memoir In the Shadow of Man, the marine biologist behind the camera, Christine Figgener, recounts her own life spent studying and protecting sea turtles.

From scorching deserts to frozen seabeds, from the highest peaks of the Himalaya to the hadal depths of the oceans, there are habitats on this Earth that appear hostile to life--yet where, nevertheless, life flourishes. In North American forests, wood frogs awaken each spring from solid blocks of ice. Under the Saharan sun, shielded by silvery hairs, desert ants sprint through the midday heat that is lethal to any other animal. At the bottom of ice-covered lakes, painted turtles pass months without breathing oxygen. Transporting readers to far-flung environments we could never call home, in Super Natural, award-winning science writer Alex Riley paints an awe-inspiring portrait of life's remarkable resilience even under the harshest circumstances.

Seventy-one percent of the earth's surface is ocean. These waters created, shaped, and continue to sustain not just human life, but all life on Planet Earth, and perhaps beyond it. They serve as the stage for our cultural history--driving human development from evolution through exploration, colonialism, and the modern era of global leisure and trade. They are also the harbingers of the future--much of life on Earth cannot survive if sea levels are too low or too high, temperatures too cold or too warm. Our oceans are vast spaces of immense wonder and beauty, and our relationship to them is innate and awe inspired.

Deep Water is both a lyrically written personal meditation and an intriguing wide-ranging reported epic that reckons with our complex connection to the seas.

A golden era of deep-sea discovery is underway. Revolutionary studies in the deep are rewriting the very notion of life on Earth and the rules of what is possible. In the process, the abyss is being revealed as perhaps the most amazing part of our planet, with a topography even more varied and extreme than its Earthbound counterpart. Teeming with unsuspected life, an extraordinary interconnected ecosystem deep below the waves has a huge effect on our daily lives, influencing climate and weather systems, with the potential for much more--good or bad depending on how it is exploited. 

Eloquently and passionately, Helen Scales brings to life the majesty and mystery of an alien realm that nonetheless sustains us, while urgently making clear the price we could pay if it is further disrupted. 

In this richly informative volume, brimming with new discoveries and more than three hundred colorful images of jaw-dropping fish and coral reefs, you'll swim in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans; you'll be dazzled in the Coral Triangle and amazed in Triton Bay. Up close you'll meet the Cenderawasih fairy wrasse, with its fluorescent yellow streak; the polka-dot longnose filefish; and the multicolored seadragon. There are scarlet-colored corals, baby-blue sponges, daffodil crinoids, and all sorts of mystifying creatures that change color at the drop of a hat. The whale shark is almost larger than life and the author's beloved pygmy seahorse, unless photographed, is almost too tiny to see. 

This edition of The World Beneath has new text from award-winning author Dr. Richard Smith that covers recent developments and discoveries affecting the rapidly changing landscape of the world's coral reefs, a wealth of new images from recent dives around the world, and a thorough index.

The companion to the popular National Geographic Disney+ special Secrets of the Octopus, narrated by Paul Rudd, this beautifully illustrated book explores the underwater world of the octopus-a creature that resembles an alien lifeform, but whose behavior has earned it a reputation as one of the most intelligent animals on the planet.

This journey into the world of the octopus will reveal how the large and capable brain of these creatures occupies their whole body-not just their heads-and they can actually adjust their genetic makeup to respond to the demands of the environment. It will allow readers to watch them change shape and color in order to camouflage themselves more effectively than any other species. And it will divulge how octopus mothers give their all in order to bring forth a new generation.

Susan Casey’s journey takes her from a community in Hawaii known as “Dolphinville,” where the animals are seen as the key to spiritual enlightenment, to the dark side of the human-cetacean relationship at marine parks and dolphin-hunting grounds in Japan and the Solomon Islands, to the island of Crete, where the Minoan civilization lived in harmony with dolphins, providing a millennia-old example of a more enlightened coexistence with the natural world.

Along the way, Casey recounts the history of dolphin research and introduces us to the leading marine scientists and activists who have made it their life’s work to increase humans’ understanding and appreciation of the wonder of dolphins.

Sharks have been fighting for their lives for 500 million years and today are under dire threat. They are the longest-surviving vertebrate on Earth, outlasting multiple mass extinction events that decimated life on the planet. But how did they thrive for so long? By developing superpower-like abilities that allowed them to ascend to the top of the oceanic food chain.

John Long, who for decades has been on the cutting edge of shark research, weaves a thrilling story of sharks’ unparalleled reign. The Secret History of Sharks showcases the global search to discover sharks’ largely unknown evolution, led by Long and dozens of other extraordinary scientists. They embark on digs to all seven continents, investigating layers of rock and using cutting-edge technology to reveal never-before-found fossils and the clues to sharks’ singular story. 

For centuries, humans ignored sound in the “silent world” of the ocean, assuming that what we couldn’t perceive, didn’t exist. But we couldn’t have been more wrong. Marine scientists now have the technology to record and study the complex interplay of the myriad sounds in the sea. Finally, we can trace how sounds travel with the currents, bounce from the seafloor and surface, bend with the temperature and even saltiness; how sounds help marine life survive; and how human noise can transform entire marine ecosystems. 

In Sing Like Fish, award-winning science journalist Amorina Kingdon synthesizes historical discoveries with the latest scientific research in a clear and compelling portrait of this sonic undersea world. From plainfin midshipman fish, whose swim-bladder drumming is loud enough to keep houseboat-dwellers awake, to the syntax of whalesong; from the deafening crackle of snapping shrimp, to the seismic resonance of underwater earthquakes and volcanoes; sound plays a vital role in feeding, mating, parenting, navigating, and warning—even in animals that we never suspected of acoustic ability. 

When "Monster" Mike Schultz won snowboarding gold in Pyeongchang, South Korea, it was the culmination of a decade of reinvention, in every sense of the word.

Ten years earlier he'd lain bleeding on the side of a mountain after a devastating snowmobile accident. Now he stood tall on the Paralympic podium, supported by a prosthetic knee and foot of his own creation.

Driven to Ride chronicles Schultz's improbable journey following a lifesaving amputation. From a place of debilitating pain and depression, he tapped into the same sense of adventure that had once taken him to the top of competitive snowmobile racing and followed it to the pinnacle of an entirely new sport: adaptive snowboarding.

Norwich, a charming Vermont town of roughly three thousand residents, has sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics for the past thirty years—and three times that athlete has returned with a medal.

How does Norwich do it? To answer this question, New York Times reporter Karen Crouse moved to Vermont, immersing herself in the lives of Norwich Olympians past and present. There, amidst the organic farms and clapboard colonial buildings, she discovered a culture that’s the opposite of the hypercompetitive schoolyard of today’s tiger moms and eagle dads. In Norwich, kids aren’t cut from teams. They don’t specialize in a single sport, and they even root for their rivals. What’s more, their hands-off parents encourage them to simply enjoy themselves. Making it to the Olympics is seen not as the pinnacle of an athlete’s career but as a fun stop on the way to achieving other, longer-lasting dreams. Norwich, Crouse realized, wasn’t just raising better athletes than the rest of America; it was raising happier, healthier kids.

Full of inspiring stories of Olympians who excelled on and off the sports field—and had a blast doing so—Norwich is the book for every parent who wants to raise kids to be levelheaded, fulfilled, and successful.

The torch relay―that staple of Olympic pageantry―first opened the summer games in 1936 in Berlin. Proposed by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, the relay was to carry the symbolism of a new Germany across its route through southeastern and central Europe. Soon after the Wehrmacht would march in jackboots over the same terrain.

The Olympic festival was a crucial part of the Nazi regime's mobilization of power. Nazi Games offers a superb blend of history and sport. The narrative includes a stirring account of the international effort to boycott the games, derailed finally by the American Olympic Committee and the determination of its head, Avery Brundage, to participate. Nazi Games also recounts the dazzling athletic feats of these Olympics, including Jesse Owens's four gold-medal performances and the marathon victory of Korean runner Kitei Son, the Rising Sun of imperial Japan on his bib.

Harnessing nature’s most powerful forces, elite downhillers descend icy, rugged slopes at speeds cresting 90 miles per hour. For decades, American skiers struggled to match their European counterparts, and until this century the US Ski Team could not claim a lasting foothold on the roof of the Alps, where the sport’s legends are born.

Then came a fledgling class of American racers that disrupted the Alpine racing world order. Led by Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn, Julia Mancuso and Ted Ligety, this band of iconoclasts made a place for their country on some of the world’s most prestigious race courses. Even as new technology amplified the sport’s inherent danger, the US Ski Team learned how to win, and they changed downhill racing forever.

The Fall Line is the story of how it all came together, a deeply reported reconstruction of ski racing’s most dramatic season. Drawing on more than a decade of research and candid interviews with some of the sport’s most elusive figures, award-winning journalist Nathaniel Vinton reveals the untold story of how skiers like Vonn and Miller, and their peers and rivals, fought for supremacy at the Olympic Winter Games.

Even today, it's considered one of the most thrilling races in Olympic history. The hundred-meter sprint final at the 1924 Paris Games, featuring three of the world's fastest swimmers--American legends Duke Kahanamoku and Johnny Weissmuller, and Japanese upstart Katsuo Takaishi--had the cultural impact of other milestone moments in Olympic history: Jesse Owens's podiums in Berlin and John Carlos's raised, black-gloved fist in Mexico City. Never before had an Olympic swimming final prominently featured athletes of different races, and never had it been broadcast live. Across the globe, fans held their breath.

In less than a minute, an Olympic record would be shattered, and the three men would be scrutinized like few athletes before them. For the millions worldwide for whom swimming was a complete unknown, the trio did something few could imagine: moving faster through water than many could on land. As sportsmen, they were godlike heroes, embodying the hopes of those who called them their own, in the US and abroad. They personified strength and speed, and the glamour and innovation of the Roaring Twenties. But they also represented fraught assumptions about race and human performance. It was not only "East vs. West"--as newspapers in the 1920s described the competition with Japan--it was also brown versus white. Rich versus poor. New versus old. The race was about far more than swimming.

Three Kings traces the careers and rivalries of these men and the epochal times they lived in. The 1920s were transformative, not just socially but for sports as well. For the first time, athletes of color were given a fair (though still not equal) chance, and competition wasn't limited to the wealthy and privileged. Our modern-day conception of athleticism and competition--especially as it relates to the Olympics--traces back to this era and athletes like Kahanamoku, Weissmuller, and Takaishi, whose hard-won victories paved the way for all who followed.

Play It Forward features twenty-five inspirational stories of badass women from all corners of the sports universe, curated by TOGETHXR, a sports media company founded by legends Sue Bird, Alex Morgan, Simone Manuel, and Chloe Kim. From profiles of professional athletes and Olympians at the top of their game to everyday women putting in the work without a crowd, these are true tales of fierce competitors, dedicated teammates, and passionate advocates who are all too accustomed to hearing the word "no." Each story highlights an inspiring athlete or team who is defying expectations and rebelling against inequality in big and small ways, including:

• Indigenous women forming a softball team in Mexico
• Older women finding friendship and purpose through competitive swimming
• A woman mountain-climbing her way out of oppression in Afghanistan
• WNBA players developing a voice for social justice and influencing a pivotal election

This is my offering. My love letter to them, and to us.

Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, has been known to bring historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women’s freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost because of our refusal to engage with our forestrugglers’ lessons?

A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women’s intellectual and political work at the center of today’s liberation movements.

Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders—from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde—Jackson sets the record straight about Black women’s longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods.

Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. Despite being barely five feet tall, unable to read, and suffering from a brain injury, she managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some seven hundred people. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood.

Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman’s life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes more palpable the more we understand it—a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. 

The dismissal of "Black violence" as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force--from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt--has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away. 

Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation.

Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time. 

Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic—and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer’s creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong's question, "What did I do to be so Black and blue?" In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world's favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey--an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16thcentury. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as "Blue Black." The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon.

Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.

Fen’s world is crumbling. Newearth, a once-promising planet gifted by the all-powerful alien Makers, now suffers from failed terraforming, leaving its people on the brink of collapse. Fen has spent her life working as a mercenary bodyguard for a cunning magistrate, entangled in the politics of the empire that shattered her family. But then her fathers—her last remaining tether to hope—are executed by the ruthless Sovereign, who marks Fen for the same fate.

With nothing left to lose, Fen escapes with a single map and an old quarterstaff, embarking on a dangerous quest to seek out the last remnants of her parents’ rebellion. But the underground insurgents she finds may be even more dangerous than the Sovereign’s army. At the center of it all stands Alekhai, the Sovereign’s heir—a brutal, power-hungry force of destruction. Though he embodies everything Fen despises, his dangerous plans might be the empire’s last chance at survival…or the final push to its doom.

The city of Bulwark is aptly named: a walled city built to protect and preserve the people who managed to survive a series of great cataclysms, Bulwark was founded on a system where sacrifice is rewarded by the AI that runs the city. Over generations, an elite class has evolved from the descendants of those who gave up the most to found mankind’s last stronghold, called the Sainted.

Saint Enita Malovis, long accustomed to luxury, feels the end of her life and decades of work as a bio-prosthetist approaching. The lone practitioner of her art, Enita is determined to preserve her legacy and decides to create a physical being, called Nix, filled with her knowledge and experience. In the midst of her project, a fellow Sainted is brutally murdered and the city AI inexplicably erases the event from its data. Soon, Enita and Nix are drawn into the growing war that could change everything between Bulwark’s hidden underclass and the programs that impose and maintain order.

In Earth's not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.

But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find—and save—her. As they voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange, encountering other travelers along the way, they learn more about their sister's work and the corporations that want what she discovered.

But the farther they go, the more uncertain their mission becomes: What dangerous attention did Nora attract, and how well do they really know their sister—or each other? Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship, and ecological disaster.

As World War III rages, the scientists in Antarctica are thankful for the isolation – until a group of Chinese scientists arrive at the American research base. In their truck is a dead body, the first murder in Antarctica. The potential for a geopolitical firestorm is great, and, with no clear jurisdiction, the Americans don’t know what to do. But they soon realize the Chinese scientists have brought far more with them than the body…

Within seventy-two hours, thirteen others lie dead in the snow, murdered in acts of madness and superhuman strength. An extremophile parasite from the truck, triggered by severe cold, is spreading by touch. It is learning from them. Evolving. It triggers violent tendencies in the winter crew, and, more insidiously, the beginnings of a strange symbiotic telepathy.

Exhausted by suspicion and fear, with rescue impossible for months, the desperate crew members turn on each other. A small group of survivors try to resist the siren call of the growing hive mind and stay alive long enough to solve the mystery of the symbiotic microbe’s origins. But the symbiote is more than a disease – it is a biological weapon that can change the balance of power in a time of war.

The survivors cannot let anyone infected make it to the summer season, when planes will arrive to take them – and potentially the symbiote – back to civilization.

On the Great Plains of Oklahoma, in the heart of the Cherokee Nation, a strange atmospheric disturbance is noticed by Jim Hardgray, a down-on-his-luck single father trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter, Tawny. At NASA's headquarters in Houston, Texas, astrophysicist Dr. Mikayla Johnson observes an interaction with the Voyager 1 spacecraft on the far side of the solar system, and she concludes that something enormous and unidentified is heading directly for Earth. And in an undisclosed bunker somewhere in the United States, an American threat forecaster known only as the Man Downstairs intercepts a cryptic communication and sends a message directly to the president and highest-ranking military brass: "First contact imminent."

The object was a black orb, roughly two meters in diameter. Despite its large size, it made no sound as it moved. Although it wasn't chasing Jeong-su fast enough to catch him, it was unrelenting and persistent in its pursuit...

One evening in downtown Seoul, Jeong-su is smoking a cigarette outside when he sees something impossible: a huge black orb appears out of nowhere and sucks his neighbor inside. Jeong-su manages to get away, but the terrifying sphere can move through walls, so he's sure he won't be able to hide for long.

The orb soon begins consuming every person caught in its path, and no one knows how to stop it. Impervious to bullets and tanks, the orb splits and multiplies, chasing the hapless residents of Seoul out into the country and sparking a global crisis with widespread violence and looting. Jeong-su must rely on his wits as he makes the arduous journey in search of his elderly parents. But the strangest phases of this ever-expanding disaster are yet to come and Jeong-su will be forced to question everything he has taken for granted.

Growing your own food is good for you and the planet. Backed by scientific research, Indigenous knowledge, and the authors' years of firsthand experience, Homegrown Handgathered offers field-tested techniques for beginners and experts alike to thrive off the bounty of the land with confidence. This complete manual for organic food production will show you how to select a site, plan your garden, source and start seeds, manage pests and weeds, compost, preserve your harvests, and more. 

Comprehensive growing guides for more than 15 essential crops-from beans, carrots, and corn to squashes, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes-detail favored growing conditions, processing tips, key nutrients, and more. Each crop chapter also features easy-to-follow recipes from a range of cultures that will transform your harvest into delicious, nourishing meals. From Jalapeño Cornbread and Oyster Mushroom Grits to Venison Borscht and Walnut-Shiitake Burgers, gardening never tasted so good!

Learn how to quilt the fun and easy way with Amy Latta! Using pre-cut fabrics and other beginner-friendly tips, Amy breaks down the complexities of quilting so you can enjoy every part of the process to bring your unique, handmade quilts to life. Created especially for new quilters, each chapter teaches popular quilting techniques that build on each other as you go.

Take your first quilting steps with sashing, which is simply sewing around a central fabric block. Amy then teaches, step by step, how to make famous quilting designs such as Patchwork, Flying Geese, Pinwheels, and Stars. But the best part of all? While you learn these fun techniques, you’ll be stitching up cute quilts and accessories to gift and decorate your home! Some of the beautiful creations waiting inside include:

- Playful Pinwheels Quilt
- Pine Tree Pillow Cover
- Crossbody Cell Phone Bag
- Missouri Star Lap Quilt
- Easy Nine-Patch Tote Bag
- Embellished Denim Jacket

Are you a parent or an otherwise amply sized Woodchuck interested in making projects with, or for, your kids? Or are you an aspiring small Woodchuck ready to get into some quality mischief that involves a hammer, nails, and your very own pocketknife? Well, do we have a guide for you!

Offerman Woodshop is opening its avuncular doors to woodworkers of all ages in the form of twelve brand-new, family-friendly undertakings perfect for kids, from beginner offerings like a handmade box kite to more challenging structures like a garden planter. 

All projects are achievable and fun and encourage eye contact, giggles, handshakes, and other old-fashioned familial engagements, while introducing young woodworkers-to-be to the satisfaction and good clean fun of hands-on crafting.