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Yale student Lily Chen arrives in Taipei hungry: for family, for culture, for connection.But her summer of discovery quickly unravels. Her classes are grueling, her roommate unbearable, and a reckless, deeply awkward trip to the hot springs with a guy she barely knows soon ignites vicious gossip.Then her grandfather dies.Grieving and adrift, Lily must confront her own questions about the culture she inherited but never fully understood. She embarks on a wryly funny, often devastating search for understanding: of herself, her family, and the meaning of home.All over one unforgettable summer in Taipei.’Kuang is sharply attuned to current mores, but prefers satire to lecturing – reminiscent, in this respect, of her fellow American writers Kiley Reid and Curtis Sittenfeld, who have also written wonderful campus novels.

Philip Deval, a soldier recently returned from the beaches of Normandy, arrives in Palestine on a peace-keeping mission in the final days of the British Mandate.

The Sea of Galilee glitters in the distance as war-weary troops marvel at the novelty of oranges and sun a paradise that belies a fierce new conflict about to erupt.

Some years later, Philip begins work teaching at a school in the English countryside and meets the enigmatic music mistress, Frances Darwood. Over long evenings spent listening to records in her music room, they grow close.

But Philip is a changed man, and must confront the secrets and scars of all he has lived through which threaten, even now, to upend his future.

Farewell to Eden is a sweeping and profound novel about faith in all its forms, and a rich portrait of an embattled post-war Britain. It asks the question: how, after great suffering, do we retain our humanity, learn to love again, and believe in the promise of a better life?

An immersive and unforgettable novel of one man’s life in the aftermath of the American Civil War. I knew as I made my way home that there was no home. All the old things .

. . were gone forever.

Against the rapidly shifting landscape of post Civil War America, Tennyson Bouguereau – freed man, devoted brother, nascent singer, conflicted soldier and wanted man – journeys to find meaning and belonging. From the relative safety of home in Tennessee with his sister Rosalee, he is offered the possibility of a whole new life in Nashville, until a surprising trip to Victorian England changes everything. Exquisitely rendered, and with a rich cast of characters, The Newer World is a lyrical, visceral novel about what it is to survive, and what might be lost along the way.

‘I met Mollie’s paintings before I met Mollie’ Shortly after the imposed isolation of the pandemic, Sara Baume came across a painting at a pop-up exhibition in a renovated shed in rural West Cork. It so intrigued her that she was inspired to make contact with the artist. Mollie Douthit, a North Dakotan exile, was living and working alone in a log cabin down a ravaged laneway surrounded by rugged coastline.

Sara and Mollie discovered they had much in common – a dysfunctional attitude towards companionship, a devotion to the daily rituals of their respective art practices, an affinity with nature. They started to meet every month for soup and punishing swims in the Atlantic. Sara fell under the spell of Mollie’s paintings, pictures that welded memory and reality, and gradually started to write about them, curious as to whether any particular insight might be provided by the intimacy of friendship with the artist, and whether it might be possible to craft a book in the style of the paintings.

But what she had not anticipated was that a settled period in her own life would coincide with a period of tumultuous change for Mollie, and soon she found herself squabbling with more complex ideas, about community and nationality, about neurosis and mysticism, about love and pain and the power of art.

Cricket is just a shy kid who likes drawing when he first meets Olympia. She’s older, more confident; she bullies him into some light vandalism and instantly he’s in love. When they’re together, they talk about their futures, how they’re going to travel the world, the beauty and rapture of art.

Then those futures start to arrive in unexpected ways, the years and decades pile up between them, the art world seduces and disappoints and frustrates them.

And they have to figure out, again and again, what it is to be an artist, and who and what to love.

This is a wild and beautiful novel about two friends who believe they can change the world, if only they can start their own movement, dodge charlatans, remain open-eyed and open-hearted, avoid going mad, avoid dying young of rare cancers, stay true to their ideals and never tire of beauty. Not easy, but not impossible, either.