SHE LOVED FINE THINGS, AND SHE HAD NO DOUBT THAT SHE DESERVED THEM. . . . Young Latha knows that she was not meant to be a servant. She was born for finer things, like the rose-smelling soap she steals from the family she has worked for since she was five, or the glasses of fresh lime juice she helps herself to after a long day. But the hard truth is that her life is tied to Thara, the family’s spoiled daughter, and for the next thirty years they grow up bound by love, betrayal, resentment, and an impossible secret. Then there is Biso, a devoted mother of three, who risks everything to escape from her tyrannical husband. Though her journey begins with hope, she navigates a disastrous path that ultimately binds her story to Latha and Thara’s in the most unexpected and heartbreaking way. Set against the volatile backdrop of class and prejudice in Sri Lanka, A Disobedient Girl is a bold and deeply moving tale about the will to survive and the incredible power of the human spirit to transcend the unforgiving sweep of tragedy.

When a reporter for The New York Times uproots her family to move to West Africa, she manages her new role as breadwinner while finding women cleverly navigating extraordinary circumstances in a forgotten place for much of the Western world. “A story you will not soon forget.”—Kathryn Bigelow, Academy Award–winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty In 2015, Dionne Searcey was covering the economy for The New York Times, living in Brooklyn with her husband and three young children. Saddled with the demands of a dual-career household and motherhood in an urban setting, her life was in a rut. She decided to pursue a job as the paper’s West Africa bureau chief, an amazing but daunting opportunity to cover a swath of territory encompassing two dozen countries and 500 million people. Landing with her family in Dakar, Senegal, she quickly found their lives turned upside down as they struggled to figure out their place in this new region, along with a new family dynamic where she was the main breadwinner flying off to work while her husband stayed behind to manage the home front. In Pursuit of Disobedient Women follows Searcey’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes rollicking experiences of her work in the field, the most powerful of which, for her, center on the extraordinary lives and struggles of the women she encounters. As she tries to get an American audience subsumed by the age of Trump and inspired by a feminist revival to pay attention, she is gone from her family for sometimes weeks at a time, covering stories like Boko Haram–conscripted teen-girl suicide bombers or young women in small villages shaking up social norms by getting out of bad marriages. Ultimately, Searcey returns home to reconcile with skinned knees and school plays that happen without her and a begrudging husband thrown into the role of primary parent. Life, for Searcey, as with most of us, is a balancing act. She weaves a tapestry of women living at the crossroads of old-fashioned patriarchy and an increasingly globalized and connected world. The result is a deeply personal and highly compelling look into a modern-day marriage and a world most of us have barely considered. Readers will find Searcey’s struggles, both with her family and those of the women she meets along the way, familiar and relatable in this smart and moving memoir.

On March 25, 1969 Linda Hale Bucklin learned her vivacious mother was dead, her right temple blown out by a bullet from her father's pistol. Was it suicide or homicide? Standing up to her father, heir to the Broadway/Hale Department Store fortune, Linda is disinherited, then ostracized from the family she loves. When her father marries his mistress, Denise Minnelli, stepmother to Liza Minnelli, the family unravels. Once a child of privilege, Linda recounts, in vivid detail, her extraordinary life—summers on the family's 10,000 acre ranch in Northern California, hunting trips to Africa and Alaska, high society vignettes of a fourth-generation San Francisco family, and her father's final decision: to leave the entire family fortune to Minnelli. But amid the ashes, Linda finds a new strength: the strength to forgive the one who started it all. REVIEWS: "...a jolting memoir." ~The New York Post "...a book you won't be able to put down." ~David Patrick Columbia, New York Social Diary

Sri Lanka, 1979. The Herath family has just moved to Sal Mal Lane, a quiet street disturbed only by the cries of the children whose triumphs and tragedies sustain the families that live there. As the neighbors adapt to the newcomers in different ways, the children fill their days with cricket matches, romantic crushes, and small rivalries. The innocence of the children—a beloved sister and her overprotective siblings, a rejected son and his twin sisters, two very different brothers—contrasts sharply with the petty prejudices of the adults charged with their care. But the tremors of civil war are mounting, and it is only a matter of time before the conflict engulfs them all and the sleepy neighborhood erupts in violence. Tender and heartbreaking, On Sal Mal Lane is an evocative story of what was lost to a country and its people.

Author and illustrator Martín Prechtel is internationally known for his explorations of ancient folklore and uncovering the lessons therein for modern readers. In The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, he revives a hitherto unknown Guatemalan Tzutujil Mayan tale of the beginnings of the world with a poetic retelling of the story, 28 evocative drawings, and a critical analysis that both enlightens and entertains. Having lived with the Mayans and learned their language, Prechtel authoritatively retells the powerful tale of the Tall Girl who weaves the world in a loom, her parents the Sun and the Moon who repudiate her suitors, and the mysterious man who disguises himself as a hummingbird to lure her away. Prechtel expands this archetypal story with five layers of commentary, each teasing out a different wisdom and revealing its relevance to the world today.

*NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING RACHEL WEISZ AND RACHEL MCADAMS *AUTHOR OF ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE READS From the New York Times bestselling author of The Power comes a novel about a young woman who must return home in the wake of her father’s death and confront the tight-knit Orthodox community that she ran away from—reigniting the old flames of forbidden love. When a young photographer living in New York learns that her estranged father, a well-respected rabbi, has died, she can no longer run away from the truth, and soon sets out for the Orthodox Jewish community in London where she grew up. Back for the first time in years, Ronit can feel the disapproving eyes of the community. Especially those of her beloved cousin, Dovid, her father’s favorite student and now an admired rabbi himself, and Esti, who was once her only ally in youthful rebelliousness. Now Esti is married to Dovid, and Ronit is shocked by how different they both seem, and how much greater the gulf between them is. But when old flames reignite and the shocking truth about Ronit and Esti’s relationship is revealed, the past and present converge in this award-winning and critically acclaimed novel about the universality of love and faith, and the strength and sacrifice it takes to fight for what you believe in—even when it means disobedience.

A mother-daughter story about the strong pull of tradition, and the lure and cost of breaking free of it. When Shoko decided to marry an American GI and leave Japan, she had her parents' blessing, her brother's scorn, and a gift from her husband-a book on how to be a proper American housewife. As she crossed the ocean to America, Shoko also brought with her a secret she would need to keep her entire life... Half a century later, Shoko's plans to finally return to Japan and reconcile with her brother are derailed by illness. In her place, she sends her grown American daughter, Sue, a divorced single mother whose own life isn't what she hoped for. As Sue takes in Japan, with all its beauty and contradictions, she discovers another side to her mother and returns to America unexpectedly changed and irrevocably touched.