Recommendations based on "Fair Play"
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By Ocean Vuong
An instant New York Times Bestseller! Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award Shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction! Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Oprah.com, Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, Nylon, The Week, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more. "A lyrical work of self-discovery that's shockingly intimate and insistently universal...Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post Poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. Named a Best Book of the Year by: GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more!
By Chloe Michelle Howarth
** Shortlisted for the 2023 Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction **** An Evening Standard ‘One to Watch in 2023 **** An Independent ‘Best Romantic Summer Reads' **** A Book of the Month pick for Diva, Irish Examiner, Novellic & Sainsbury’s Magazine **** A Most Anticipated pick for PinkNews & Queer on the Street **It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. Neither will be easy, but only one will offer her happiness.Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp. An atmospheric sapphic love story and coming-of-age novel with the intensity of Megan Nolan's Acts of Desperation, the long hot summer of André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name and the female friendships of Anna Hope's Expectation.‘A tender and heartfelt coming-of-age tale’ – Heat‘A compassionate take on the push and pull between what's expected and what is felt’ – Herald‘A deeply moving, heartfelt love story’ – Daily Mail‘Lucy tells her story in a true, compelling voice, with an eye for minutiae, quaint apercus, and confidences that make her account moving and convincing’ – SAGA Magazine‘Tender and poignant... Ideal reading for the last month of summer’ – Diva'Intense and all-consuming - like the first love it describes - Sunburn transported me to the heart of summer and the heady days of late adolescence. I won't soon forget Chloe Michelle Howarth's addictive, lushly written debut' - Laura Sims'Capturing all the intensity of first love, blended with the claustrophobia of small-town life, this debut, inspired by real experience, is tender and raw' - The Bookseller'A beautiful coming of age love novel written with an insightful poetical prose, rich with religious allegory and texture which underscores the transformative, spiritual power of first love explored' - Scene Magazine
By Ottessa Moshfegh
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon,Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & AudibleA New York Times Bestseller“One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.” — Entertainment Weekly“Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.” —VogueFrom one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
By Coco Mellors
Three Estranged Siblings Return To Their Family Home In New York After Their Beloved Sister's Death In This Unforgettable Story Of Grief, Identity, And The Complexities Of Family, From The Acclaimed Author Of Cleopatra And Frankenstein. The Three Blue Sisters Are Exceptional - And Exceptionally Different. Avery, The Eldest And A Recovering Heroin Addict Turned Strait-laced Lawyer, Lives With Her Wife In London; Bonnie, A Former Boxer, Works As A Bouncer In Los Angeles Following A Devastating Defeat; And Lucky, The Youngest, Models In Paris While Trying To Outrun Her Hard-partying Ways. They Also Had A Fourth Sister, Nicky, Whose Unexpected Death Left Avery, Bonnie, And Lucky Reeling. A Year Later, As They Each Navigate Grief, Addiction, And Ambition, They Find They Must Return To New York To Stop The Sale Of The Apartment They Were Raised In. But Coming Home Is Never As Easy As It Seems. As The Sisters Reckon With The Disappointments Of Their Childhood And The Loss Of The Only Person Who Held Them Together, They Realize That The Greatest Secrets They've Been Keeping Might Not Have Been From Each Other, But From Themselves. Imbued With Coco Mellors's Signature Combination Of Humor And Heart, Blue Sisters Is A Story Of What It Takes To Keep Living After Loss - And, Ultimately, To Fall In Love With Life Again-- Provided By Publisher.
By Aldous Huxley
A gorgeous hardcover edition of Aldous Huxley's enduring masterwork, "one of the most prophetic dystopian works of the 20th century" (Wall Street Journal), that must be read and understood by anyone concerned with preserving the human spirit in the face of our "brave new world"Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order—all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization.Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as a thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.
By Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963--only a month before the author's suicide--Sylvia Plath's harrowing autobiographical novel traces a young woman's descent into an emotional breakdown. The brilliant and disturbing story of Esther Greenwood's journey from the glamorous world of magazine publishing in New York to the isolating world of the asylum has become one of the most famous books of the late twentieth century, and still has all its power to shock and move us.
By Sally Rooney
Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind - and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expects. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi...
By Angie Thomas
Product Description 8 starred reviews ∙ William C. Morris Award Winner ∙ National Book Award Longlist ∙ Printz Honor Book ∙ Coretta Scott King Honor Book ∙ #1 New York Times Bestseller!"Absolutely riveting!" --Jason Reynolds"Stunning." --John Green"This story is necessary. This story is important." --Kirkus (starred review)"Heartbreakingly topical." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)"A marvel of verisimilitude." --Booklist (starred review)"A powerful, in-your-face novel." --Horn Book (starred review)Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does--or does not--say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.And don't miss On the Come Up, Angie Thomas's powerful follow-up to The Hate U Give. Review "The story of Starr Carter, a 16-year-old who sees her childhood best friend fatally shot by a police officer, is compelling, thought-provoking, and conversation-enabling. One readers are sure to be talking about for a long time."--Brightly"Beautifully written in Starr's authentic first-person voice, this is a marvel of verisimilitude as it insightfully examines two worlds in collision. An inarguably important book that demands the widest possible readership."--Booklist(starred review)"Pair this powerful debut with Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely's ALL AMERICAN BOYS to start a conversation on racism, police brutality, and the Black Lives Matter movement."--School Library Journal(starred review)"The Hate U Give is an important and timely novel that reflects the world today's teens inhabit. Starr's struggles create a complex character, and Thomas boldly tackles topics like racism, gangs, police violence, and interracial dating. This topical, necessary story is highly recommended for all libraries."--Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA)(starred review)"Thomas has penned a powerful, in-your-face novel that will similarly galvanize fans of Kekla Magoon's How It Went Down and Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely's All American Boys."--Horn Book(starred review)"Though Thomas's story is heartbreakingly topical, its greatest strength is in its authentic depiction of a teenage girl, her loving family, and her attempts to reconcile what she knows to be true about their lives with the way those lives are depicted--and completely undervalued--by society at large."--Publishers Weekly(starred review)"Ultimately the book emphasizes the need to speak up about injustice. That's a message that will resonate with all young people concerned with fairness, and Starr's experience will speak to readers who know Starr's life like their own and provide perspective for others."--Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books(starred review)"With smooth but powerful prose delivered in Starr's natural, emphatic voice, finely nuanced characters, and intricate and realistic relationship dynamics, this novel will have readers rooting for Starr and opening their hearts to her friends and family. This story is necessary. This story is important."--Kirkus Reviews(starred review)"In her debut novel, Angie Thomas creates what might be one of the decade's most vivid voices in YA fiction. Though the appalling scenario depicted here is sadly familiar, Thomas's clear and honest writing moves beyond sound bites to represent the real people and communities behind
By CASEY. MCQUISTON
From the New York Times bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue comes a new romantic comedy that puts a queer spin on Kate & Leopold. A 23-year-old realises her subway crush is displaced from 1970's Brooklyn, and she must do everything in her power to help her - and try not to fall in love with the girl lost in time - before it's too late . . .