NOVEDADES

For the ancients, everything worth pursuing in life flowed from a strong sense of justice or one’s commitment to doing the right thing, no matter how difficult. In order to be courageous, wise, and self-disciplined, one must begin with justice. The influence of the modern world often tells us that acting justly is optional. Holiday argues that that’s simply untrue—and the fact that so few people today have the strength to stand by their convictions explains much about why we’re so unhappy.

Even in a family of chaotic necromancers, Daria “Dasha” Avramov has always been an outlier. An event planner at the Arcane Emporium occult megastore, Dasha is also a devil eater: a rare necromantic witch with an affinity for banishing demons and traversing the veil, the boundary between this realm and the next. Still grieving the loss of both beloved parents years ago, and plagued by a dangerous obsession with the world beyond the veil, Dasha is fiery yet guarded, an expert at dodging commitment. Her worst regret is a devastating breakup with the wise, empathetic, and sensual Ivy Thorn, her event-planning counterpart at Honeycake Orchards, and probably the love of Dasha’s life. Dasha has managed to break Ivy’s heart not once, but twice, so things are more than a little tense between them.

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?