An astonishing untold story from the nineteenth century—a “riveting…engrossing…‘American Epic’” (The Wall Street Journal) and necessary work of history that reads like Gone with the Wind for the Cherokee. “A vigorous, well-written book that distills a complex history to a clash between two men without oversimplifying” (Kirkus Reviews), Blood Moon is the story of the feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. Their enmity would lead to war, forced removal from their homeland, and the devastation of a once-proud nation. One of the men, known as The Ridge—short for He Who Walks on Mountaintops—is a fearsome warrior who speaks no English, but whose exploits on the battlefield are legendary. The other, John Ross, is descended from Scottish traders and looks like one: a pale, unimposing half-pint who wears modern clothes and speaks not a word of Cherokee. At first, the two men are friends and allies who negotiate with almost every American president from George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. But as the threat to their land and their people grows more dire, they break with each other on the subject of removal. In Blood Moon, John Sedgwick restores the Cherokee to their rightful place in American history in a dramatic saga that informs much of the country’s mythic past today. Fueled by meticulous research in contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts—and Sedgwick’s own extensive travels within Cherokee lands from the Southeast to Oklahoma—it is “a wild ride of a book—fascinating, chilling, and enlightening—that explains the removal of the Cherokee as one of the central dramas of our country” (Ian Frazier). Populated with heroes and scoundrels of all varieties, this is a richly evocative portrait of the Cherokee that is destined to become the defining book on this extraordinary people.

This powerful, timely novel in verse exposes provocative truths about periods, sex, shame, and going viral for all the wrong reasons. After school one day, Frankie, a lover of physics and astronomy, has her first sexual experience with quiet and gorgeous Benjamin—and gets her period. It’s only blood, they agree. But soon a gruesome meme goes viral, turning an intimate, affectionate afternoon into something sordid, mortifying, and damaging. In the time it takes to swipe a screen, Frankie’s universe implodes. Who can she trust? Not Harriet, her suddenly cruel best friend, and certainly not Benjamin, the only one who knows about the incident. As the online shaming takes on a horrifying life of its own, Frankie begins to wonder: is her real life over? Author Lucy Cuthew vividly portrays what it is to be a teen today with this fearless and ultimately uplifting novel in verse. Brimming with emotion, the story captures the intensity of friendships, first love, and female desire, while unflinchingly exploring the culture of online and menstrual shaming. Sure to be a conversation starter, Blood Moon is the unforgettable portrait of one girl’s fight to reclaim her reputation and to stand up against a culture that says periods are dirty.

“Why would I expect to feel blameless?” Troubled and meditative, Blood Moon is an examination of racism, whiteness, and language within one woman’s life. In these poems, words are deeply powerful, even if—with the onset of physical infirmity—they sometimes become unfixed and inaccessible, bringing together moral and mortal peril as Patricia Kirkpatrick’s speaker ages. From a child, vulnerable to “words / we learned / outside and in school, / at home, on television”: “Some words you don’t say / but you know.” To a citizen, reckoning with contemporary police brutality: “Some days need a subject and an action / or a state of being because it’s grammar. / The cop shot. The man was dead.” And to a patient recovering from brain surgery: “I don’t have names. / Words are not with me.” Throughout the collection, the moon plays companion to this speaker, as it moves through its own phases, disappearing behind one poem before appearing fully in the next. In Kirkpatrick’s hands, the moon is confessor, guide, muse, mirror, and—most of all—witness, to the cruelty that humans inflict upon one another. “The moon,” she reminds us, “will be there.” Compassionate, contemplative, occasionally wonderstruck, Blood Moon is a moving work of moral introspection.

Mateo has waited all year for this weekend: a road trip with his best friends to view the fabled blood moon eclipse. Even better, they're riding in the jeep he rebuilt himself. But when a driverless truck appears out of nowhere, their fun turns to terror. Driven off the road, Mateo and his friends realize there's something sinister happening under the eclipse. Can Mateo and his friends escape the spirits of the blood moon, or will they be cursed forever?

In the year 1880, an impoverished, half-English journalist named Eduardo Dawson, hitching from Mexico for the American border, meets three fellow travelers who could not be more different. The first is Phoebe Surgener, a wry, strong-willed American ranch lady of obvious wealth and influence. The second is Pleasant Honeyflower, a seedy, fast-talking phony preacher. The third is Marcela Sandoval, a magically beautiful Mexican shepherdess. After their meeting on the road, there follows a seemingly endless night that begins with friendly “get-to-know-you" chatter and evolves as they cross the desert under a great blood moon into episodes of passionate young love, depraved sexual violence, betrayal, and abandonment that will have unimaginable repercussions for years to come. As fate will have it, they all end up in Pleasant Valley, Arizona, and their chance encounter in the desert will turn out to be a harbinger of The Pleasant Valley War, the bloodiest land war in the history of the American West.

They say no good deed ever goes unpunished, a sentiment Dara understands fully now that she is paying for a crime she didn’t commit. It was stupid to call in a murder she didn’t really see. But how could Dara have kept silent? Now a stunning—scratch that, a dangerous—man with a frightening secret of his own is telling her he can help. Yeah, right. A telepath knows better than to trust mere words. The last decade of Tristan’s life has been penance. All that time spent among the worst dregs of society might have made him begin to question his humanity, but he’s never felt so much like an animal as he does around this timid, delicate female. Her very presence stirs the beast within him; Tristan can feel it growing stronger every day. Any more time with Dara, and it might overpower him completely. But without her, he stands no chance at all…

Based on a true story. Manya, 19 and a college senior arrives with her sole surviving family (Uncle Gregory) at the swank New York apartment of Gregory's gangster friend Alan who is immediately attracted to Manya, and she's intrigued by him: an older man who's suave, cynical and charismatic. After a respectible interval, Gregory leaves. Alone with her, Alan cajoles Manya into revealing herself and then attacks her, first destroying her innocence and then raping her. A year later, Manya now in medical school, invites Alan to dinner and flirts with him, seemingly toying with the idea of "resuming the affair" when Gregory arrives. Manya tells Gregory about the rape. He is shocked. She attacks him for his complicity: leaving an innocent girl alone with such a man. Then they sit down to an elaborate meal and Manya reveals the horrors she has undergone in the intervening year: catonia, pregnancy, madness, eventual realization of her condition, frustrated attempts to obtain a legal abortion and, finally, a self-induced abortion of a 6-month-old fetus. The tale is horrifying, cathartic and only a prelude to Manya's final, shocking act of revenge.