Recent Haul

This past month has been a rough one for me and because of that I haven’t been buying too many books. I did place a book outlet order though and I have a few Kindle books that I’ve purchased.

Kindle

Billionaire Alec Sherbrooke might live a life of luxury, but that doesn’t mean he’s afraid to work hard and get his hands dirty. And when his best friend suggests Alec could never handle a job that requires manual labor, he accepts the bet. One week later, Alec arrives on Sanborn Island, fully expecting to be the winner at the end of the month. What he doesn’t expect is to fall for his boss.

Gianna Ferguson has lived on Sanborn Island, one of New England’s premier getaways, her entire life, so she is well acquainted with spoiled, wealthy playboys. When her cousin asks her to give Alec Sherbrooke a job with the family landscaping business for the summer, she is not enthusiastic about the idea, but she agrees.

It’s not long before Gianna sees Alec as more than just another playboy looking for some summer fun. But will mistakes from Gianna’s past prevent Alec and Gianna from getting what both their hearts desire?

Dear Wes, let’s skip pleasantries.
I’m not going to med school a virgin.
I want to learn everything, and I want you to teach me.

I’ve looked at all the men in my life, made a list of pros and cons, found you the most suitable.
Sure, a lot of that was your gorgeous blue eyes and your charming smile. The strong arms and the tattooed torso don’t hurt either.
I swear, I don’t have a thing for bad boys. Just you.
There’s no way in hell I’m ever sending this. I can’t believe I’m even writing it.
But, god, I really, really do want to study under you.
Is that too formal?
How am I supposed to phrase this?
Wes, please, teach me how to f*ck.
I promise I’ll study hard.
I’m an excellent student.
And, well, I’m pretty sure I don’t need to spell out why this is win/win.
– Quinn

Losing It is a standalone first time romance with the perfect mix of heat, humor, and emotion. Come see why readers say “no one writes broken bad boys like Crystal Kaswell.”

Brody Jenkins is the king of both cryptocurrency and surfing. He has the perfect playboy, beach-bum life––until he loses it all…

Brody doesn’t want to be a hero, but he can’t ignore the woman in the raging rip tides in front of his beachside home.

Vella Clark shouldn’t be in the ocean, but she’s been practicing saying “YES!” to life, and that mantra brought her here.

Brody and Vella have sizzling chemistry, but is Brody willing to risk everything to be with her?

When Brody’s massive fortune is stolen, the only logical suspect is Vella. What will happen next? Find out in California Crush.

The States of Love books are scorching stories with heat, heart, suspense, and laughter. They feature hunky heroes, strong heroines, seductive instalove, sizzling bedroom scenes, and satisfying happily-ever-after endings. Start anywhere. Binge-read them all. Ride the waves with Brody and Vella now to satisfy your steamy romance craving.

Isabela is on the path to reaching her career goals ahead of schedule. No distractions. That’s before she agrees to let her friends decide on what to do for her birthday. Now she finds herself staring at the birthday present she never counted on. The one her well-meaning friends bought her at a charity auction. It’s a birthday present she knows will only cause problems but who can resist tall, dark and handsome? 

Grayson is a rising star in the financial world. A world that is ruled by control and intellect. When he is recruited by a client as a bachelor in a charity auction, he assumes he will only have to spend one evening with an insipid rich woman. He never counted on the sultry, driven beauty he’s been bought for by a mutual friend. People in your life just cause distractions, but can he let this one go, even when he has to give up his control to keep her?

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force—and one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.

Getting on the cheerleading squad is hard enough without a psycho on the loose…

For Harrow High freshman Dakota Densford, life should be easy. All she has to worry about is talking to cute boys and remembering her locker combination. But when cheerleading tryouts draw near, she learns the cards are stacked against her—spots on the varsity team are limited. Dakota faces her competition head-on, but when her life is threatened, that takes the competition to a whole new level.

High school is never easy, and freshman year is off to a rough start…

Between Dakota’s uniform being ripped up and masked vandals trashing another girl’s house, everyone is suspect. To complicate matters further, Dakota has a thing for Andy McGraw, but she finds him locking lips with another girl.

The harassment continues, and when Dakota finds suspicious flyers inside her best friend’s locker, she doesn’t know what to think. The principal’s unfeeling, overachiever daughter, Brittani Barlow, will do anything to secure her place on the team. But Dakota’s neighbor, on the other hand, definitely fits the profile of a sociopath.

Cheerleading has become a game of life or death.

Book Outlet

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love.

Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited— her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak’s best work yet.

The 2020 National Book Award–nominated poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epic—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era. 

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.

Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself. 

The Sentence asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book.

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls’ Day 2019 and ends on All Souls’ Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That’s what his mother always told him.

Now, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success–and movie adaptation–to his name, along with a series of subsequent lesser efforts that have paid the bills but not much more. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: To move into the house–what the locals call “The Devil House”–in which a briefly notorious pair of murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected 1980s teens. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected–back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.

This edition of Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel features a suede-like custom cover with beautiful metallic foiling and a ribbon marker.

Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by the brooding, proud Edward Rochester to care for his ward Adèle. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit. She falls in love. Hard.

But there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again?

Ivy, Mateo, and Cal used to be close. Now all they have in common is Carlton High and the beginning of a very bad day.

Type A Ivy lost a student council election to the class clown, and now she has to face the school, humiliated. Heartthrob Mateo is burned out–he’s been working two jobs since his family’s business failed. And outsider Cal just got stood up…. again.

So when Cal pulls into campus late for class and runs into Ivy and Mateo, it seems like the perfect opportunity to turn a bad day around. They’ll ditch and go into the city. Just the three of them, like old times. Except they’ve barely left the parking lot before they run out of things to say…

Until they spot another Carlton High student skipping school–and follow him to the scene of his own murder. In one chance move, their day turns from dull to deadly. And it’s about to get worse.

It turns out Ivy, Mateo, and Cal still have some things in common. They all have a connection to the dead kid. And they’re all hiding something.

Now they’re all wondering–could it be that their chance reconnection wasn’t by chance after all?

From the author of One of Us Is Lying comes a brand-new pulse-pounding thriller. It’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with murder when three old friends relive an epic ditch day, and it goes horribly–and fatally–wrong.