When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine decides to take her mother, Della, on a tour of England's most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will bring them closer together and help them reconcile the past. Twenty-five years earlier the disappearance of Jasmine's older sister devastated their tight-knit community. This tragedy returns to haunt Jasmine and Della when another child mysteriously goes missing on Hampstead Heath. As Jasmine immerses herself in the world of her literary idols &– including Jane Austen, the Bront&ë sisters and Virginia Woolf &– Della is inspired to rediscover the wisdom of her own culture and storytelling. But sometimes the stories that are not told can become too great to bear. Ambitious and engrossing, After Story celebrates the extraordinary power of words and the quiet spaces between. We can be ready to listen, but are we ready to hear?

"Book one of the After series--the Internet sensation with millions of readers. Tessa didn't plan on meeting Hardin during her freshman year of college. But now that she has, her life will never be the same"--

On January 19, 2000, a fire raged through Seton Hall University's freshman dormitory, killing three students and injuring 58 others. Among the victims were Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, roommates from poor neighborhoods who made their families proud by getting into college. They managed to escape, but both were burned terribly. After the Fire is the story of these young men and their courageous fight to recover from the worst damage the burn unit at Saint Barnabas hospital had ever seen. It is the story of the extraordinary doctors and nurses who work with the burned. It is the story of mothers and fathers, of faith and family and the invisible ties that bind us to each other. It is the story of the search for the arsonists -- and the elaborate cover-up that nearly obscured the truth. And it is the story of the women who came to love these men, who knew that real beauty is a thing not seen in mirrors.

"A decade in the writing, the haunting story of a son's quest to understand the mystery of his father's death--a universal memoir about the secrets families keep and the role they play in making us who we are. Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family's back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael's father, was found alone near his car on Chicago's North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack. Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone, leaving behind a young widow, two sons, a fractured family--and questions surrounding the mysterious nature of his death that would obsess Michael throughout adolescence and long into adulthood. Finally, roughly his father's age when he died, and a seasoned reporter himself, Michael set out to learn what happened that night. Died after visiting friends, the obituaries said. But the details beyond that were inconsistent. What friends? Where? At the heart of his quest is Michael's all-too-silent, opaque mother, a woman of great courage and tenacity--and a steely determination not to look back. Prodding and cajoling his relatives, and working through a network of his father's buddies who abide by an honor code of silence and secrecy, Michael sees beyond the long-held myths and ultimately reconciles the father he'd imagined with the one he comes to know--and in the journey discovers new truths about his mother. A stirring portrait of a family and its legacy of secrets, After visiting friends is the story of a son who goes in search of the truth and finds not only his father, but a rare window into a world of men and newspapers and fierce loyalties that no longer exists"--Provided by publisher.

A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist for Best Fiction and Best Debut • BookBrowse's Best Book of the Year • A Marie Claire Best Women's Fiction of the Year • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year • A PopSugar Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A Washington Post 10 Books to Read in March • A Newsweek Best Book of the Summer • A USA Today Best Book of the Week • A Washington Book Review Difficult-To-Put-Down Novel • A Refinery 29 Best Books of the Month • A Buzzfeed News 4 Books We Couldn't Put Down Last Month • A New Arab Best Books by Arab Authors • An Electric Lit 20 Best Debuts of the First Half of 2019 • A The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the Year “Garnering justified comparisons to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns... Etaf Rum’s debut novel is a must-read about women mustering up the bravery to follow their inner voice.” —Refinery 29 The New York Times bestseller and Read with Jenna TODAY SHOW Book Club pick telling the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community. "Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of—dangerous, the ultimate shame.” Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children—four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear. Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man. But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.

After more than twenty years in prison, Adnan Syed’s murder conviction was overturned, and he was finally set free. Rabia Chaudry’s New York Times bestseller and award-winner Adnan’s Story reveals how the case was mishandled and became the subject of Sarah Koenig’s Peabody Award-winning podcast Serial. In early 2000, Adnan Syed was convicted and sentenced to life plus thirty years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland. Syed has maintained his innocence, and Rabia Chaudry, a family friend, has always believed him. By 2013, after almost all appeals had been exhausted, Rabia contacted Sarah Koenig, a producer at This American Life, in hopes of finding a journalist who could shed light on Adnan’s story. In 2014, Koenig's investigation turned into Serial, a Peabody Award-winning podcast with more than 500 million international listeners. But Serial did not tell the whole story. In this compelling narrative, Rabia Chaudry presents key evidence that she maintains dismantles the State’s case: a potential new suspect, forensics indicating Hae was killed and kept somewhere for almost half a day, and documentation withheld by the State that destroys the cell phone evidence—among many other points—and she shows how fans of Serial joined a crowd-sourced investigation into a case riddled with errors and strange twists. Featuring information about Adnan’s life in prison, and weaving in his personal reflections with never-before-seen letters, Rabia’s account is “a true story about real people. Adnan’s Story adds context and humanizes it in a way that could change how you think about the case and about Serial itself” (Los Angeles Times). “Chaudry’s clear, vivid and highly readable account of the case will bring the story to life for readers unfamiliar with the podcast, and even the most devoted Serial fans will find fresh insight and a vast amount of new material. Chaudry’s legal training serves her well as she marshals her defense, but so too does the Pakistani heritage and Muslim faith she shares with Syed.” —Washington Post

Aged nineteen, Alison McKelvie was a self-confessed romantic, immersed in books and poetry, and dreaming of beauty, truth and love. In 1940, whilst working as a secretary at MI6, Alison met Alexander Wilson. Thirty years her senior, Alexander was worldly and charismatic. An intense affair quickly led to marriage and two children. But the Wilsons' lives then spiralled into the depths of poverty. Alexander was sacked, imprisoned twice, and then declared bankrupt. His lack of reliability was a hefty emotional burden for Alison to bear. Nevertheless, she loved her husband unreservedly and stuck by him through thick and thin. In 1963, Alexander died suddenly of a heart attack. Alison's world imploded when she discovered that their life together had been built upon layer after layer of deception. Who was Alexander Wilson? How well had Alison really known him? Slowly the lies were unravelled: Alexander had been a novelist, spy and, devastatingly, a bigamist. Alison was the third of four wives, her children two of seven. The inspiration for critically-acclaimed drama Mrs Wilson, Before & After is the powerful and poignant memoir of Alison Wilson. 'Before' peels back the complex layers of a marriage steeped in lies, and the shattering heartbreak which followed. 'After' tells of an intensely-felt redemption through religion. Before & After is, first and foremost, a love story, but it is also an account of one extraordinarily strong woman's deep, unwavering faith.