SUPPER WITH LOVE de Michelle Braxton

Michelle Braxton has always believed that the secret ingredient to any dish is love, and that the best part of any meal is the joy that comes with sharing food with the people you care about. She founded her blog Supper with Michelle as a way to celebrate vegetables and spread the joy and happiness she finds in plant-forward and pescatarian cooking. With over 85 recipes, Michelle shows just how simple, nourishing, and flavorful plant-forward meals can be.

SUPPER WITH LOVE
Vibrant, Delicious, and Comforting Plant-Forward and Pescatarian Recipes for Every Day
by Michelle Braxton
Harvest, January 2024

In SUPPER WITH LOVE, Michelle shares her very personal journey of food, love, and life. With some of her favorite beautifully photographed recipes for vibrant and satisfying salads, soups, side dishes, sandwiches, bowls, brinners, and suppers, highlighting natural and in-season ingredients every step of the way. Bringing meatless twists to some classic comfort dishes, she crafts approachable, easy-to-prepare meals that are nourishing and crave-worthy. And as a firm believer in finding the food lifestyle that works best for you, she encourages readers to get into your groove and “freestyle it » by offering countless variations and substitutions for ingredients, ways to “veganize” recipes (if they aren’t already vegan), recipe pairings, and creative ways to repurpose leftovers, so you can enjoy her recipes any way you want. From simple one-pot meals to Sunday suppers, there are recipes for every taste, mood, and schedule.

Though her passion for food was nurtured by her upbringing and childhood in Georgia, Michelle now finds inspiration in cuisines from all over the world. Readers will be inspired with innovative salads like the Strawberry & Halloumi Salad with Creamy Balsamic Dressing and Zesty Ranch Broccoli-Pasta Salad, crowd-pleasing sides like Loaded Smashed Potatoes and Baked Tomato Rice with Castelvetrano Olives, and because Michelle has been coined as the “soup queen”—wholesome soups like Sunshine Dal and blog favorite… Vegetarian Zuppa Toscana, and hearty entrees like the Sunday Night Vegetable Pot Pie and Kitchen Sink Enchilada Casserole.

Supper with Love makes eating your veggies fun, nutritious, and delicious. Whether you’re a vegetarian or an omnivore, a savvy home chef or a total beginner, or looking to feed one hungry mouth or a whole table’s worth, these recipes will not only satisfy, but feed your body and soul. So, pull up a chair, because you’re invited for supper!

Michelle Braxton creates, cooks, and photographs recipes for her popular plant-forward and pescatarian-friendly blog Supper with Michelle. A firm believer in balance for both food and life, Michelle strives to incorporate as many fresh, seasonal, and natural ingredients as possible into her dishes. Preparing every meal with love, Michelle hopes that by sharing her veggie-enthusiastic recipes with the world, others can in return share them with their friends and family and pass on a little bit of that love, too. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

LOVE, ME de Jessica Saunders

Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid, Emily Henry, and Emily Griffin will fall in love with this woman’s fiction debut.

LOVE, ME
by Jessica Saunders
Union Square & Co., January 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

“Love, Me.” It’s how Jack always signed his letters to Rachel. She hadn’t thought about that in years…

This is the story of Rachel Miller, a lawyer and mother of two who’s just as comfortable in the courtroom as she is on the sidelines of the soccer field. Rachel’s life is unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight when photographs and letters of her and her high school boyfriend, the famous actor Jack Bellow, are published in a tabloid. Rachel’s life is upended as this newfound attention calls into question her relationship with her husband, her career, and even her superstar ex.

LOVE, ME takes readers on a journey through key moments in Rachel’s life: falling in love for the first time and having her heart broken; meeting her future husband and creating a life with him; and navigating the celebrity gossip circuit and her equally gossipy suburban frenemies. Betrayed by someone she trusted and reunited with the man she tried so hard to forget, Rachel has to ask herself, “How did I get here? And where am I going?”

A pitch-perfect exploration of modern married life, Jessica Saunders’s deliciously readable novel embraces the truth that some old flames can’t be snuffed out, no matter how many years go by.

Jessica Saunders is a lawyer and writer living in the suburbs of New York City.

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON d’Ellen Baker

Orphan Train meets Before We Were Yours meets Water for Elephants in this compelling multigenerational novel of survival, love, and the families we make.

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON
by Ellen Baker
Mariner Books, February 2024

In 1924, four-year-old Cecily Larson’s mother reluctantly drops her off at an orphanage in Chicago, promising to be back once she’s made enough money to support both Cecily and herself. But she never returns, and shortly after high-spirited Cecily turns seven, she is sold to a traveling circus to perform as the “little sister” to glamorous bareback rider Isabelle DuMonde. With Isabelle and the rest of the circus, Cecily finally feels she’s found the family she craves. But as the years go by, the cracks in her little world begin to show. And when teenage Cecily meets and falls in love with a young roustabout named Lucky, she finds her life thrown onto an entirely unexpected—and dangerous—course.

In 2015, Cecily is now 94 and living a quiet life in Minnesota, with her daughter, granddaughter, and great-grandson. But when her family decides to surprise her with an at-home DNA test, the unexpected results not only bring to light the tragic love story that Cecily has kept hidden for decades but also throw into question everything about the family she’s raised and claimed as her own for nearly seventy years. Cecily and everyone in her life must now decide who they really are and what family—and forgiveness—really mean.

Sweeping through a long period of contemporary history, THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON is an immersive, compelling, and entertaining family drama centered around one remarkable woman and her determination to survive.

Ellen Baker is the author of Keeping the House and I Gave My Heart to Know This. She has worked as a bookseller and event coordinator at an independent bookstore. Originally from the Upper Midwest, she currently lives in Maine.

RED HELICOPTER —A PARABLE FOR OUR TIMES de James Rhee

A true story of triumph by award-winning business leader, impact investor, and educator James Rhee that will inspire and empower us to transform our lives and our businesses with the simple and yet powerful combination of kindness and math.

RED HELICOPTER —A PARABLE FOR OUR TIMES
lead change with kindness (plus a little math)
by James Rhee
HarperOne, April 2024

In kindergarten, James Rhee received a toy red helicopter in gratitude for a simple act of kindness—the innocent generosity of sharing his lunch. Nearly four decades later, the true meaning and lesson from this memory helped him overcome indescribable hurdles as both a first time CEO and son to a dying father. Combining the radical common sense of a child with the knowledge of an experienced private equity investor and law school graduate, James led one of the most dramatic reinventions in business history. Partnering with Black women across America, James led Ashley Stewart, a twice-bankrupt retailer with no WiFi, from the jaws of liquidation to a transcendent success that inspired a world seeking a different way. And, in the process, he was able to reconcile his own complicated past and see his mom for who she truly was.

Combining the clarity and imagination we had as children with some basic business metrics, Rhee composed a system he calls “Kindness and Math.” It’s a simple solution to the dissatisfaction and worry so many of us feel, an intuitive response to the gnawing uncertainty we face daily as we meander through our lives and struggle to understand why we might feel so out of control in our professional and personal lives. red helicopter—a parable for our times exposes the root cause for these feelings and encourages us to embrace a few key principles to reorient our lives, organizations, and the world to reflect the best in us. In this remarkable book, Rhee provides the tools we can use to:

• Embrace agency by identifying the obstacles quietly holding us back

• Construct a balance sheet of our true assets and liabilities

• Create and measure “goodwill,” the ultimate collective good

• Lead systems transformation with a framework comprised of small, scalable acts

• Drive financial profitability with little to no investment of money

• Unlock the value of difference and the unpredictable

• and more

Rhee’s fresh thinking emerged from an emotional journey in which both the professional and personal intersected and became one. The financial uncertainty, family tragedy, and soul-searching he endured, after the whole world left him and Ashley Stewart for dead, led him to create a simple and scalable solution to the struggles that ail us all. This quiet and powerful ode to humanity is sorely needed in today’s troubled world.

James Rhee is an acclaimed impact investor, founder, CEO, goodwill strategist, thought leader, and educator, who empowers people, brands, and organizations by marrying capital with purpose. He bridges the emotional with the mathematical, and gives permission for us to be human. A long-time private equity investor, James also serves as a founding member of JP Morgan Chase’s Advancing Black Pathways, a charter member of Ashoka’s Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur Network, and former Chair of the Innovation Committee of the National Retail Federation. In addition to his private sector endeavors, Rhee teaches at Howard University (where he serves as the Johnson Chair of Entrepreneurship), MIT Sloan School of Management, and Duke School of Law. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

BEHIND YOU IS THE SEA de Susan Muaddi Darraj

An exciting debut novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore—from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich—lives which intersect across divides of class, generation, and religion.

BEHIND YOU IS THE SEA
by Susan Muaddi Darraj
HarperVia, January 2024

Funny and touching, BEHIND YOU IS THE SEA brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America.

Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose own family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for “dishonoring” their name. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.

BEHIND YOU IS THE SEA faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, shifting perspectives to weave a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets.

Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of A Curious Land, a novel in stories which earned an American Book Award and was a finalist for a Palestine Book Award. In 2018, she was named a Ford Fellow by USA Artists. A past winner of the Maryland State Art Council’s Independent Artist Award, she is also the author of Farah Rocks, the first children’s book series to feature a Palestinian-American character. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at Johns Hopkins University.