Rare book dealer Lily Albrecht has just been given a tip-off about The Book of the Most Precious Substance, a 17th century manual rumoured to be the most powerful occult book ever written, if it really exists at all. With some of the wealthiest people in the world willing to pay Lily a fortune to track it down, she embarks on a journey from New York to New Orleans to Munich to Paris. If she finds it, Lily stands to gain more than just money. This could erase the greatest tragedy of her life. But will Lily's quest help her find some answers, or will she lose everything in search of a ghost?

Journey Prize winner Shashi Bhat’s "powerful, surprising and terrifying" (Rufi Thorpe) story about a high school student's traumatic experience and how it irrevocably alters her life, for fans of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Girlhood, and Pen15. Bright, hilarious, and sensitive fourteen-year-old Nina spends her spare time reading Beowulf and flirting with an internet predator. She has a vicious crush on her English teacher, and her best friend Amy is slowly drifting away. Meanwhile, Nina’s mother tries to match her up with local Indian boys unfamiliar with her Saved by the Bell references, and Nina’s worried father has started reciting Hindu prayers outside her bedroom door. Beginning with a disturbing incident at her high school, The Most Precious Substance on Earth tells stories of Nina’s life from the ‘90s to present day, when she returns to the classroom as a high school teacher with a haunting secret and discovers that the past is never far behind her. Darkly funny, deeply affecting, unsettling, and at times even shocking, Shashi Bhat’s irresistible novel-in-stories examines the relationships between those who take and those who have something taken. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is a sharp-edged and devastating look at how women are conditioned to hide their trauma and suppress their fear, loneliness, and anger, and an unforgettable portrait of how silence can shape a life.

Instead of a book she had ordered by mail, Amanda receives "Demon Possession, Past and Present." Soon after, something seems to take her over, and she wonders if she has been possessed by a female demon known to students of the Kabbalah as Naamah.

When Mary Forrest receives the gift of an astrological reading for her birthday, she doesn't expect it to be the harbinger of her life's imminent upheaval. But this is Mary's Saturn Return year, her twenty-ninth; the year that the planet Saturn returns to the exact spot it was in when she was born. According to astrology, the return of Saturn brings major life challenges that, if not met, will cycle back again 29 year later. While skeptical of the reading at first, Mary can't help but find some truth in it as her mother becomes seriously ill, her job in New York City is at a dead end, and memories of past relationships haunt her. To make it through the year, Mary must overcome intimacy and abandonment issues, resurrect her relationship with her ailing mother, and learn to trust the man she loves. A novel of flawed but believable characters, Sara Gran's debut, Saturn's Return to New York, is an introspective story of the relationships and setbacks that shape us.

From the author of City of the Dead, comes a spellbinding mystery with "the most interesting private eye...since Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander" (Washington Post). When Claire DeWitt’s ex-boyfriend Paul Casablancas, a musician, is found dead in his Mission District house, Claire is on the case. Paul's wife and the police are sure Paul was killed for his valuable collection of vintage guitars. But Claire, the best detective in the world, has other ideas. Even as her other cases offer hints to Paul’s fate—a missing girl in the grim East Village of the 1980s and an epidemic of missing miniature horses in Marin County-–Claire knows: the truth is never where you expect it, and love is the greatest mystery of all. "A distinctive new American voice in mystery fiction." —NPR’s Fresh Air

From the author of Come Closer and the Claire DeWitt series comes a highly acclaimed—and unusual—gritty thriller about a missing girl... and the addict tasked with saving her. Josephine, a former addict, is offered a thousand dollars to find a suburban couple’s missing daughter. But the search will take her into the dark underbelly of New York she thought she’d escaped—and a web of deceit that threatens to destroy her.

Winner, Trillium Book Award In Téa Mutonji’s disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides on shaving her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humor, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed. Shut Up You’re Pretty is the first book to be published under VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of color. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.