"One of the best books of this year." -Arts and Africa "Adjapon tells a gripping tale" -The Nation "Bisi Adjapon has tackled some of the truly difficult aspects of love and sexuality." -The Mirror "At times hilariously funny and at others deeply disturbing. Of Women and Frogs offers a refreshing and insider perspective onto two West Africa societies." -Literandra London "Unputdownable, a book that makes you go from laughing out loud to bawling and back to laughing again." -Ayesha Haruna Attah, author of The Hundred Wells of Salaga "Stunning. I spent hours moving between out-loud laughter, gripping fear and deep annoyance and love for Esi and her father." -Africa in Dialogue A precocious African girl, whose sexual curiosity brings unexpected heartbreak, wishes frogs will turn her into a man. Will she ever find a way to love herself again and become the extraordinary woman she hoped to be? Esi is a feisty half-Nigerian girl growing up in Ghana, with occasional visits to her family in Lagos. When curiosity about her womanhood leads to a burning punishment from her stepmother, Esi begins to question the hypocrisy of adults around her and the restrictions they place on girls. Moving between Ghana and Nigeria, this heartwarming story of a girl beating a path to self-actualization amidst political upheaval in Rawlings' Ghana and strained relationships between her ancestral countries. OF WOMEN AND FROGS is a heartwarming, soulful coming-of-age tale. Explore girlhood with the inquisitive, unflappable Esi as she journeys through the trials of becoming a woman to find her best self. "This is a really wonderful story. [Bisi Adjapon] writes with incredible vividness and clarity. [Her] similes and attention to all the senses are really extraordinary." - Dave Eggers, publisher of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

From the New York Times bestselling author of Room, a young French burlesque dancer living in San Francisco is ready to risk anything in order to solve her friend’s murder—but only if the killer doesn’t get her first. Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice—if he doesn't track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It's the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts. In thrilling, cinematic style, Frog Music digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue's lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boomtown like no other. "Her greatest achievement yet . . . Emma Donoghue shows more than range with Frog Music—she shows genius." —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life.

Forty-five-year-old actress Karrie Kline doesn't usually lose a lot of sleep over her age or her single status. But after one too many bridal showers, a notice on her apartment, an expired unemployment claim and her acting prospects drying up—too old to play the ingenue, too young for the role of matriarch—she's awake at 2:00 a.m. and determined to get perspective on her life. Starting with the men she's dated. From the man whose parents loved her more than he did, to the famous actor who had more bark than bite, Karrie traces back through her love life to uncover how her experiences have shaped her and how to find meaning in the past. Told with warmth, wit and poignancy, You Have To Kiss a Lot of Frogs shows how to face your memories—even the darkest, most secret ones—with courage, humor and hope.

A "sublime and gripping novel ... about hope: that within the world's messy pain there is still room for transformation and healing" (Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Circe), from the acclaimed author of Cantoras. “In the president’s excruciating (and sometimes humorous) encounters with his strangely healing frog ... De Robertis daringly invites us to imagine a man’s Promethean struggle to wrest control of his broken psyche under the most dire circumstances possible.” —The New York Times Book Review At his modest home on the edge of town, the former president of an unnamed Latin American country receives a journalist in his famed gardens to discuss his legacy and the dire circumstances that threaten democracy around the globe. Once known as the Poorest President in the World, his reputation is the stuff of myth: a former guerilla who was jailed for inciting revolution before becoming the face of justice, human rights, and selflessness for his nation. Now, as he talks to the journalist, he wonders if he should reveal the strange secret of his imprisonment: while held in brutal solitary confinement, he survived, in part, by discussing revolution, the quest for dignity, and what it means to love a country, with the only creature who ever spoke back—a loud-mouth frog. As engrossing as it is innovative, vivid, moving, and full of wit and humor, The President and the Frog explores the resilience of the human spirit and what is possible when danger looms. Ferrying us between a grim jail cell and the president's lush gardens, the tale reaches beyond all borders and invites us to reimagine what it means to lead, to dare, and to dream.

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP BOOK OF 2015 WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK The author of Red Sorghum and China’s most revered and controversial novelist returns with his first major publication since winning the Nobel Prize In 2012, the Nobel committee confirmed Mo Yan’s position as one of the greatest and most important writers of our time. In his much-anticipated new novel, Mo Yan chronicles the sweeping history of modern China through the lens of the nation’s controversial one-child policy. Frog opens with a playwright nicknamed Tadpole who plans to write about his aunt. In her youth, Gugu—the beautiful daughter of a famous doctor and staunch Communist—is revered for her skill as a midwife. But when her lover defects, Gugu’s own loyalty to the Party is questioned. She decides to prove her allegiance by strictly enforcing the one-child policy, keeping tabs on the number of children in the village, and performing abortions on women as many as eight months pregnant. In sharply personal prose, Mo Yan depicts a world of desperate families, illegal surrogates, forced abortions, and the guilt of those who must enforce the policy. At once illuminating and devastating, it shines a light into the heart of communist China.

In 'The Wasps' an old-fashioned father and his loose-living son come to blows--and end up in court; elsewhere Aristophanes milks the clash of generations for all it is worth by sending up the purveyors of new ideas like Socrates and Euripides (the most controversial of the great tragedians). In 'The Poet and the Women' Euripides, accused of misogyny, gets a relative in drag to infiltrate an all-woman festival and find out what revenge is being plotted, with predictable bawdy results. In 'The Frogs, ' written in the darkest days of the Peloponnesian War, the god Dionysus descends to the Underworld to find a poet to bring back: does Athens in her hour of danger need the traditional wisdom of Aeschylus or the brilliant modern cleverness of Euripides? As the great debate proceeds, Aristophanes combines parody with slapstick and political discussion with pantomime high spirit, to produce a hilarious and unique masterpiece.

“Bisi Adjapon writes with incredible vividness and clarity. Her similes and attention to all of the senses are really extraordinary.”—Dave Eggers, author of The Monk of Mokha “Melding blistering humor with razor-sharp insight, The Teller of Secrets heralds a marvel of a writer, one capable of deftly balancing questions of sexuality, politics, and feminism in a novel that is a pure joy to read.”—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize In this stunning debut novel—a tale of self-discovery and feminist awakening—a feisty Nigerian-Ghanaian girl growing up amid the political upheaval of late 1960s postcolonial Ghana begins to question the hypocrisy of her patriarchal society, and the restrictions and unrealistic expectations placed on women. Young Esi Agyekum is the unofficial “secret keeper” of her family, as tight-lipped about her father's adultery as she is about her half-sisters’ sex lives. But after she is humiliated and punished for her own sexual exploration, Esi begins to question why women's secrets and men's secrets bear different consequences. It is the beginning of a journey of discovery that will lead her to unexpected places. As she navigates her burgeoning womanhood, Esi tries to reconcile her own ideals and dreams with her family’s complicated past and troubled present, as well as society’s many double standards that limit her and other women. Against a fraught political climate, Esi fights to carve out her own identity, and learns to manifest her power in surprising and inspiring ways. Funny, fresh, and fiercely original, The Teller of Secrets marks the American debut of one of West Africa's most exciting literary talents.