LETRAS

Anthony, el hermano de Sean, es un hombre duro. Cuando eran niños, su madre intentó mantenerlos alejados del conflicto, pero tratar con Anto siempre ha sido complicado. Se suponía que Sean debía ser distinto. Se suponía que debía marcharse para no regresar jamás. Pero, tras cuatro años en Liverpool, Sean vuelve a Belfast y se encuentra con una ciudad sumida en la miseria y la frustración, y a sus amigos y a su hermano cada vez más hundidos en el pozo sin fondo del alcohol y las drogas. Una noche, Sean agrede a un desconocido, y ese acto de violencia repentina desencadenará una serie de acontecimientos que lo forzarán a decidir qué tipo de hombre quiere ser. Gracias a su propia experiencia, Michael Magee despliega un retrato de la masculinidad moderna, marcada por la clase, el trauma y el silencio, pero también por la valentía de amar y sobrevivir. Otra vez en casa es una extraordinaria obra de ficción sobre cómo encontrar tu lugar en la ciudad que te ha visto nacer y sobre la lucha por labrarse un futuro en un entorno marcado por la violencia y la desesperanza.

Freya Lockwood solía trabajar como cazadora de antigüedades con su exmentor hasta que en un viaje a El Cairo todo terminó mal. Más de veinte años después, recibe una llamada de su excéntrica tía Carole, amiga incondicional de Arthur, en la que le informa de su misteriosa muerte. Freya regresa al pueblecito inglés en el que se crio junto a su tía para acompañarla en esos difíciles momentos, donde recibe una inesperada carta encriptada de su antiguo amigo. Pero eso no es todo. En la tienda del anticuario descubre los diarios que éste había escondido donde solo ella podía encontrarlos. Todo apunta a que Arthur, conocedor del peligro de su situación, había dejado pistas a Freya y Carole para que llegaran al fondo del asunto si le pasaba algo. Además, el abogado encargado de ejecutar la herencia les impide acceder a la tienda, que Arthur ha legado a Freya en su testamento, hasta aclarar lo ocurrido. Embarcadas en la investigación, deciden asistir a un evento de fin de semana para amantes de las antigüedades que Arthur había reservado donde nada es lo que parece y nadie es quien dice ser.

“Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?” In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety. But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.

Sending Damon to prison was the worst thing Winter could’ve done. It didn’t matter that he did the crime or that she wished he was dead. Winter thought he’d cool off in jail and be anything but the horror he was, or that at the very least she’d have time to disappear before he got out. But she was wrong. Three years came and went too fast, and prison only gave him time to plan. And while Winter anticipated his vengeance, she didn’t expect this. He doesn’t want to make her hurt. He wants to make everything hurt. Damon knows he needs to get rid of Winter’s father, giving her, her sister, and her mother nowhere to run. The Ashby women are desperate for a knight in shining armor. But that’s not what’s coming. It’s time Damon took control of his future. It’s time he showed them all that he will never stop being the nightmare they think he is. Damon won’t have to break into her home to do it. As the new man of the house, he has all the keys.

Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love. In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers. In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home. Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

When 13-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in 2011, her estranged dad, Ethan, seems like the furthest thing from her mind. A convicted felon and recovering addict, Ethan has always struggled to see past himself. But then a call from his ex makes him fear their daughter's in deeper trouble than anyone realizes. Believing he's the only one who can save her, he decides to return to New York with a gift: the whole of his life, its hard-won triumphs and harrowing mistakes . . . So begins the intimate epic of Jolie and Ethan: child and adult, apart and together, different yet the same. Their journey toward each other will face opposition from grandparents and siblings and friends. It will strain connections with roommates and benefactors and a probation officer desperate to help. It will push Jolie out past her depth with a mysterious admirer, and Ethan in over his head with his first love, Jolie's mom. But as father and daughter struggle to find their footing, new vistas beckon: from a surf break in mid-'90s Delaware to group therapy during the great recession, from an encampment at Occupy Wall Street to a HoJo on Maryland's Eastern Shore, from the heights of the Brooklyn Bridge to horizons seldom seen in fiction.