Simmering tensions in a family of Australian expats newly living in L.A. explode when their daughter commits a crime she can’t remember on a big night out, and they all become complicit in the cover up…
THE ONES WE LOVE
by Anna Snoekstra
Dutton, Spring 2025
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)
Since the morning after the party – the one Liv can’t remember, the one that left her covered in bruises – there’s been a padlock on the door of her bedroom. Her parents said they found mold and it needs to be decontaminated, but they’re acting kind of strange. And her friend Leilani isn’t answering her texts, so maybe Liv did get a little out of control that night. Sharing a room with her brother Cas for a while isn’t the end of the world, as long as he doesn’t tell their parents that she’s started sleepwalking. They’re already worried enough.
Janus brought his family from Australia to LA to chase his dream of turning his bestselling novel into a screenplay. Yeah, money is tight, but he’s sure THIS rewrite is the one. He knows he let his wife down with that Liv situation, and he can’t let her down again.
Kay wasn’t sure she wanted to be a mother when she got pregnant with Liv, but she gave up everything for her daughter and then her son, Casper, as well. She’ll do whatever she has to do to take care of her kids. Her marriage, though, is a different story. And the neighbors – well, they’ll just have to be more careful.
All Cas wanted was to go home for the summer – to Australia, his real home. But his parents are making him stay in LA, AND he has to share a room with his sister. Mold? He doesn’t believe it. Since Cas’s plans were ruined, he might as well find out the truth about the padlock. And whatever it is that no one is telling him.
Anna Snoekstra’s earlier novels have been translated into fifteen languages and she is a bestseller in her homeland of Australia. She is also the creator and writer of The Ridge, a television series in development with Lucky Chap Entertainment and CreateNSW. Her first novel, Only Daughter, has been optioned by Universal Studios and Working Title, and is now being adapted by Anna into a feature film with Fictious (In Vitro). In addition, Anna writes about culture and creative process for The Guardian, Crimereads, Lindsay, HERE Magazine, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Saturday Paper, and teaches fiction writing at RMIT University in Melbourne.
Franz Kafka’s enigmatic masterpiece The Castle famously ends mid-sentence. A century later, the renowned translator Sy Kirschbaum finds his way into Kafka’s abandoned world. He crosses a wooden bridge leading from the road into the village. He finds an inn to spend the night. He sees a castle on a hill in the distance. The Castle begins again.
It’s 1999 in Southeast Texas and the Evans women, owners of the only funeral parlor in town, are keeping steady with…normal business. The dead die. You bury them. End of story. That’s how Ducey Evans has done it for the last eighty years, and her progeny—Lenore the experimenter and Grace, Lenore’s soft-hearted daughter—have run Evans Funeral Parlor for the last fifteen years without drama. Ever since That Godawful Mess that left two bodies in the ground and Grace raising her infant daughter, Luna, alone. But when town gossip Mina Jean Murphy’s body is brought in for a regular burial and she rises from the dead instead, it’s clear that the Strigoi—the original vampire—are back. And the Evans women are the ones who need to fight back to protect their town. As more folks in town turn up dead, and Deputy Roger Taylor begins asking way too many questions, Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and now Luna, must take up their blades and figure out who is behind the Strigoi’s return. As the saying goes, what rises up, must go back down. But as unspoken secrets and revelations spill from the past into the present, the Evans family must face that sometimes the dead aren’t the only things you want to keep buried. A crackling mystery-horror novel with big-hearted characters and blood-soaked Southern charm, Bless Your Heart is a gasp-worthy delight from start to finish.
Iggy Guerra is out of prison, but his homecoming is anything but smooth. His beloved mother is gone, his grief-stricken father, Armando, is deep in debt, and they are about to lose the butcher shop that has been in their family for generations. Iggy must earn his father’s lost trust in order to save La Carnicería Guerra from the threats imposed by a new rival business, a vigilante activist, and big-game hunter Orin, who has dragged Armando into his dangerous money-making schemes deep in the Everglades, where more than secrets are buried. Iggy will wrestle with the beauty and the danger of the place he calls home as he tries to save his family—without losing himself forever. Sharp as a butcher knife gleaming in the Miami sun, Alejandro Nodarse’s BLOOD IN THE CUT opens onto a deeply personal vision of the streets and swamps of Miami, where the roots are crooked but strong as mangroves.