One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past.

It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed relationship." They become lovers, and the narrator's feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf's diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.

Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

Isabella Pasternack is a food person. She revels in the beauty of a perfectly cooked egg, she daydreams about her first meal at Chez Panisse, and every inch of her tiny apartment teems with cookbooks, from Prune to Cooking by Hand to Roast Chicken and Other Stories. What Isabella is not, unfortunately, is a gainfully employed person. In the wake of a disastrous live-streamed soufflé demonstration, Isabella is summarily fired from her job at a digital food magazine and must quickly find a way to keep herself in buckwheat and anchovy paste.

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter. 2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible.

It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s fifty-second birthday. Together, the group forms an enviable portrait of middle age. The wives and husbands have been friends for over thirty years, their teenage daughters have grown up together, and the dinners, games, and rituals forming their days all reflect the rich bonds between them.

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak.

Immigrating alone from Paris to New York after the crucible of World War II, young Gazala becomes friends with two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala’s lost, beloved brother, Samir, joins her in Manhattan, this contentious, inseparable foursome makes their way into the twenty-first century, becoming the beating heart of a multigenerational found family.

The four Endicott siblings—Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude—were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country. Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven’t spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in North Dakota.

With a leading role on a hit TV show and a relationship with Hollywood’s latest heartthrob, Meg Bryan appears to have everything she ever wanted. But underneath, her happiness is as fake as her stage name, Lana Lord. Following a tiny nervous breakdown at her thirtieth birthday party, she books an impromptu trip to Ireland. Specifically, to the village where she and her best friend Aimee always dreamt of moving. When Meg arrives, the people in town don’t just recognize her, they seem to know her. She quickly—reluctantly—realizes she has somehow slipped into an alternate reality.

It’s 2011 and Deecie Jeffries’s missing person’s case in Austin, Texas, is still cold. New mom Bee, struggling with postpartum depression, is living in Portland, Maine, having left Austin–and those memories–far behind. Until Leo, her childhood crush and her estranged twin Gus’s best friend, suddenly resurfaces, drawing Bee back into their shared past. Bee’s predictable life is upended, pushing her to return to her childhood home and piece together a neighborhood’s shattered history.

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

Katie Vaughn has been burned by love in the past—now she may be lighting her career on fire. She has two choices: wait to get laid off from her job as a video producer or, at her coworker Cole’s request, take a career-making gig profiling Tom “Hutch” Hutcheson, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in Key West. The catch? Katie’s not exactly qualified. She can’t swim—but pretends that she can. Plus, Cole and Hutch are brothers. And they don’t get along. Next stop: paradise!

Dani Dorfman has somehow made it to her thirties without knowing what she wants to do with her life. So when an office romance ends poorly and gets her fired, she applies for a job in Amsterdam, idly dreaming of escaping the mess she’s created, but never imagining she'll actually get it. Except she does. By the end of her first week in Amsterdam, she’s never felt more adrift or alone. Then she crashes her bike into her high school ex-boyfriend—and suddenly life is blooming with new opportunities.

Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she's always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade.

Legal secretary by day, aspiring novelist by night, Ziya Khan pours herself into writing stories featuring the kinds of diverse characters she loves. In exchange, she’s got a growing pile of rejection letters. When yet another “thanks but no thanks” arrives on the eve of her thirtieth birthday, Ziya decides to throw her novel and her dreams in the trash. End of story. Except that when Ziya wakes up, there’s a flesh-and-blood version of her muse standing in her kitchen. His name is Aashiq, and it’s his job to inspire Ziya to write again.

One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past.

Isabella Pasternack is a food person. She revels in the beauty of a perfectly cooked egg, she daydreams about her first meal at Chez Panisse, and every inch of her tiny apartment teems with cookbooks, from Prune to Cooking by Hand to Roast Chicken and Other Stories. What Isabella is not, unfortunately, is a gainfully employed person. In the wake of a disastrous live-streamed soufflé demonstration, Isabella is summarily fired from her job at a digital food magazine and must quickly find a way to keep herself in buckwheat and anchovy paste.

After a mysterious fall from his New York City apartment, Philip Chase has moved back home with his mother, Charlene, a bitter woman who has never fully accepted the death of her younger son, Ronnie, five years earlier. Surrounded by memories of the family he no longer has, Philip is in stasis. But everything changes late one windy February night when Ronnie's high school girlfriend shows up on their doorstep. A sad young woman who still bears the scars of the accident that took Ronnie's life, Melissa is nine months pregnant. The father, she claims, is Ronnie.

The Taylor family shatters in a single night when two teenage siblings are found dead in their own home. The only surviving sibling, Vincent, never shakes the whispers and accusations that he was the one who killed them. Decades later, the legend only grows as his career as a horror writer skyrockets. Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont has spent her entire professional life hiding the fact that she is the only child of Vincent Taylor. Now on the brink of financial ruin, she's offered a job to ghostwrite her father's last book. What she doesn't know is that this project is another one of his lies.

Four romance writers. Four failed marriages. Can they create the perfect man? Romance writers should be experts on love, but that’s not the case with Libby Day and her friends. Although they can come up with great stories on the page, their relationships in real life are all miserable failures. While on a writing retreat in the mountains, they decide to try to pen the perfect man—the kind that only exists in a novel.

Four wine experts, each at a crucial point in their lives, arrive at a French vineyard estate for an unforgettable experience—but not the kind they expected. Avery gave up her hard-won but exploitative sommelier job to come, while wine prodigy Cosmo is trying to disguise that his life is in freefall. The chemistry between the pair is unmistakable, but so are the signs of danger. Millionaire Sonny owns a tacky wine brand and can’t help aggravating Cosmo, while caustic magazine writer Maëlys hovers with her pen poised.

When a prominent Manhattan lawyer is murdered, two estranged sisters - one the dead man’s widow, the other his ex - must set aside mistrust and old resentments...but can they escape their past?

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter. 2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible.

At ten years old, she catches more than her parents and older sister suspect. Over their summer break, her mother plans to finish her novel, her father wants to grill and watch cricket, and her fifteen-year-old sister hopes to catch the eye of a local lifeguard. With everyone around her distracted, she teams up with a new friend to solve a mystery that haunts this vacation community: they'll close the case of what happened to Charlotte, a child who was presumed drowned two years earlier.

Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down at a performance—the show either deserves a five-star rave or a one-star pan. Anything in between is meaningless. On the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he doesn’t deliberate over the rating for Hayley Sinclair’s show, nor does he hesitate when the opportunity presents itself to have a one-night stand with the struggling actress.

The only child of a sheet-metal worker and a dinner lady who worked at the canteen of the local school, Geoff Dyer grew up in a world shaped by memories of the Depression and the Second World War. But far from being a story of hardship overcome, this loving memoir is a celebration of opportunities afforded by the post-war settlement, of which the author was an unconscious beneficiary. The crux comes at the age of eleven with the exam that decided the future of generations of British schoolkids: secondary modern or the transformative possibilities of grammar school?

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn't these be the best years of her life? Why doesn't it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.

From national bestselling author Meg Mitchell Moore comes a sparkling new novel following a young woman entwined in the opulent lives of her neighbors on Block Island, set against a backdrop of scandal, secrets, and a not-so-subtle love triangle, perfect for readers of The Wedding People and Pineapple Street.