Archives par étiquette : Grove Atlantic

CASUALTIES OF TRUTH de Lauren Francis-Sharma

From the author of Book of the Little Axe, nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, comes a riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller that explores the abuses of history and the costs of revenge.

CASUALTIES OF TRUTH
by Lauren Francis-Sharma
Atlantic Monthly Press, February 2025

Lauren Francis-Sharma’s two previous novels have established her as a deft chronicler of history and its intersections with flawed humans struggling toward justice. Her latest is a gripping novel set between Washington, DC and Johannesburg, South Africa that asks if we are ever truly able to escape our past and how to right an unquestionable wrong.

Prudence Wright seems to have it all: a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, DC; and the past glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enables her to stay home and dedicate her days to her autistic son. When she and Davis head out for dinner with one of Davis’s new colleagues on a stormy summer evening, Prudence has little reason to think that certain details of her past might arise sometime between cocktails and the appetizer course. Yet when Davis’s new colleague turns out to be an old acquaintance, Matshediso, Prudence recalls the traumatic events of her childhood growing up in Baltimore and the formative time she spent in South Africa in 1996. There, she attended the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, which uncovered the many horrors and human rights abuses of the Apartheid state. These hearings fundamentally shaped her sense of righteousness and justice, and when Mat reveals the real reason for his reappearance, Prudence’s values will be put to a more difficult test than she has ever faced before.

Lauren Francis-Sharma, a child of Trinidadian immigrants has written about the Caribbean in both her novels. “‘Til the Well Runs Dry” loosely recounts the story of her grandmother’s mid-20th century journey to the United States, with feature articles in both the Washington Post in July 2014 and The Baltimore Sun in March 2015. Her latest, “Book of the Little Axe,” takes place in the late 18th century to the early 19th century, from the changing colonial rule on the island of Trinidad to the rugged terrain of Bighorn Mountain in western North America.

FRIGHTEN THE HORSES d’Oliver Radclyffe

For fans of Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There and Thomas Page McBee, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES is a textured and sharply written queer memoir about coming of age in the fourth decade of one’s life and embracing one’s truest self in a world that wants to fit everyone in neat boxes.

FRIGHTEN THE HORSES
by Oliver Radclyffe
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, September 2024

© Lisa Ross @studiolisaross

From the outside, Oliver Radclyffe spent four decades living an immensely privileged, beautifully composed life. As the daughter of two well-to-do British parents and the wife of a handsome, successful man from an equally privileged family, Oliver played the parts expected of him. He checked off every box—marriage, children (four), a white-picket fence surrounding a stately home in Connecticut, and a golden retriever named Biscuit.

But beneath the shiny veneer, Oliver was desperately trying to stay afloat as he struggled to maintain a façade of normalcy—his hair was falling out in large clumps, he couldn’t eat, and his mood swings often brought him to tears. And then, on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon in September, Oliver Radclyffe woke up and realized the life of a trapped housewife was not one he was ever meant to live. In fact, Oliver had spent his entire life denying the deepest, truest parts of himself. In the wake of this realization, he began the challenging, messy journey toward self-acceptance and living a truer life, knowing he risked the life he’d built to do so.

The journey is fraught, as Oliver navigated leaving a marriage and reintroducing himself to his children. And despite the challenges he faced, Oliver realizes there was no way for him to go back to the beautiful lie of his previous life. Not if he wanted to survive. FRIGHTEN THE HORSES is a trans man’s coming of age story, about a housewife who comes out as lesbian and tentatively, at first, steps into the world of queerness. With growing courage and the support of his newfound community, Oliver is finally able to face the question of his gender identity and become the man he is supposed to be. The story of a flawed, fascinating, gorgeously queer man, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES introduces Oliver Radclyffe as a witty, arresting, unforgettable voice.

Oliver Radclyffe is part of the new wave of transgender writers unafraid to address the complex nuances of transition, examining the places where gender identity, sexual orientation, feminist allegiance, social class, and family history overlap. His work has appeared in The New York Times and Electric Literature, and he has a book of essays due for publication in October 2023 with Unbound Edition Press. He currently lives on the Connecticut coast, where he is raising his four children.

INVISIBLE WOMAN de Katia Lief

From internationally bestselling crime writer Katia Lief, INVISIBLE WOMAN is the story of a dangerous secret held for too long between estranged best friends and a long marriage that comes apart with devastating consequences.

INVISIBLE WOMAN
by Katia Lief
‎ Atlantic Monthly Press/Grove Atlantic, January 2024

Joni Ackerman’s decision to raise children came with a steep cost. Twenty-five years ago, she was a pioneering filmmaker, one of the few women to break into the all-male club of Hollywood feature film directors. But she and her husband Paul had always wanted a family, and his ascending career at a premier television network provided a safety net. They have recently transplanted to Brooklyn, so that Paul can launch a major East Coast production studio, when a scandal rocks the film industry and forces Joni to revisit a secret from long ago involving a powerful man who abused women, including the friend of her youth, Val.

Joni is adamant that the time has come to tell the story, but Val and Paul are reluctant, for different reasons. As the marriage frays and the friends spar about whether to speak up, Joni’s struggles with isolation in a new city and old resentments about the sacrifices she made start to boil over. She takes solace in the novels of Patricia Highsmith—particularly the masterpiece Strangers on a Train, with its duplicitous characters and their murderous impulses—until the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred.

INVISIBLE WOMAN is at once a literary thriller about the lies we tell each other (and ourselves), and a powerful psychological examination of friendship, marriage, and motherhood.

Katia Lief is the author, most recently, of the novels A Map of the Dark and Last Night published by Mulholland Books/Little, Brown under the pseudonym Karen Ellis. Earlier work includes USA Today and internationally bestselling novels Five Days in Summer (a #1 bestseller in Germany), One Cold Night (#1 on Kobo’s UK bestseller list), and The Money Kill, the fourth installment of her Karin Schaeffer series published by HarperCollins and nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She teaches fiction writing at The New School in Manhattan and lives with her family in Brooklyn.

 

HOT SPRINGS DRIVE de Lindsay Hunter

An urgent, vicious blade of a novel about a shocking betrayal and its aftermath, HOT SPRINGS DRIVE asks just how far you’ll go to have everything you want.

HOT SPRINGS DRIVE
by Lindsay Hunter
‎ Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, November 2023

Jackie Stinson’s best friend is dead, and everyone knows who killed her.

Jackie wants to be many things, but a martyr has never been one of them. She is an ex-emotional eater and mother of four, who has finally lost the weight she long yearned to be free of. In her new, sharp-edged body, she goes by Jacqueline. But leaving her old self behind proves harder than she ever imagined. And while she believes she should be happier, misery still chases her, and motherhood threatens to subsume what little is left of her.

Her only salve is her best friend Theresa, whose seemingly perfect life she desperately covets. Since they met in the maternity ward 15 years earlier, the two have survived the trials of motherhood side by side—Theresa with her quiet, cherubic daughter, and Jacqueline with her rambunctious, unruly boys. Their bond is tight, but it is not enough to keep Jacqueline, finally moving through the world in the body she has always wanted, from stealing a bit of Theresa’s perfect life.

HOT SPRINGS DRIVE is a dark, heart-pounding exploration of one woman’s deepest desires, and how the consequences of betrayal can ripple outward beyond the initial strike point. In her third, fiercest, and now hotly anticipated novel, acclaimed literary voice Lindsay Hunter deftly peels back the fragile veneer of two suburban families and the secrets roiling between them.

Lindsay Hunter is the author of two story collections and two novels. Her second collection, Don’t Kiss Me, was named one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year: Short Stories. Her latest novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, was a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award and a 2017 NPR Great Read. She lives in Chicago.

ELAINE de Will Self

From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a brilliant portrait of motherhood, sublimated desire, and the reverberations of the Cold War in a novel that investigates and reimagines the life of the author’s mother.

ELAINE
by Will Self
Grove Press, September 2024

Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed “the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation” (Guardian). His work has been shortlisted for awards including the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year, and selected for best of the year lists, including those of the Times, Guardian, Independent and Financial Times. He also earns rapturous reviews, with his last novel, Phone, hailed as “one of the most significant literary works of our century” (New Statesman). Following a blistering personal account of addiction in his memoir Will, Self turns his forensic eye to the life of his own equally troubled mother, Elaine, in this brilliantly conceived new novel.

Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member, inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life.

Based on the intimate diaries Self’s mother kept for over forty years, ELAINE is a writer’s attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent’s interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, ELAINE shows Will Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London.