One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo's wife-and the only person Jessa's ever been in love with-walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother's art escalates-picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose-and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them. Kristen Arnett's debut novel is a darkly funny, heart-wrenching, and eccentric look at loss and love.

"Masterful ... Elegance, darkness, even fear are deftly intertwined ... A wonderful read."--LUIS ALBERTO URREA, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The House of Broken Angels "A seductive, urgent tale about desire, family, the pursuit of truth, and the art of storytelling, More Than You'll Ever Know will astonish readers with its vastness, romance, tragedy, and abundant heart. I didn't want this book to ever end." -- JESSAMINE CHAN, New York Times bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers An evocative drama about a woman caught leading a double life after one husband murders the other, and the true-crime writer who becomes obsessed with telling her story--this masterful work of literary suspense marks the debut of an extraordinary new writer The dance becomes an affair, which becomes a marriage, which becomes a murder ... In 1985, Lore Rivera marries Andres Russo in Mexico City, even though she is already married to Fabian Rivera in Laredo, Texas, and they share twin sons. Through her career as an international banker, Lore splits her time between two countries and two families--until the truth is revealed and one husband is arrested for murdering the other. In 2017, while trawling the internet for the latest, most sensational news reports, struggling true-crime writer Cassie Bowman encounters an article detailing that tragic final act. Cassie is immediately enticed by what is not explored: Why would a woman--a mother--risk everything for a secret double marriage? Cassie sees an opportunity--she'll track Lore down and capture the full picture, the choices, the deceptions that led to disaster. But the more time she spends with Lore, the more Cassie questions the facts surrounding the murder itself. Soon, her determination to uncover the truth could threaten to derail Lore's now quiet life--and expose the many secrets both women are hiding. Told through alternating timelines, More Than You'll Ever Know is both a gripping mystery and a wrenching family drama. Presenting a window into the hearts of two very different women, it explores the many conflicting demands of marriage and motherhood, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing someone--especially those we love. "A gripping and thoughtful exploration of motherhood and marriage, the complexity of female desire, and the consequence of our obsession with true crime ... One of the best suspenseful dramas I've read in years. An exceptional, stunning debut--I absolutely loved it." -- ASHLEY AUDRAIN, New York Times bestselling author of The Push "A sprawling, stunning, twisting triumph ... A story of marriage and murder, of the secrets we endure and the lies we tell ourselves to keep them." -- CHRIS WHITAKER, New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End

Just as blue eyes or a birthmark may be passed down through the generations, so too are other, far less welcome traits, not all of them physical, but emotional. More in Anger is the poignant story of three generations of women and the emotional legacy that follows each of them throughout the years. In 1915, Opal King marries a man whose past steeped him in anger. Opal’s thwarted dreams, and her husband’s temper, reverberate and influence the life of their elder daughter Pearl. As a child, Pearl mistreats her younger sister, and as an adult woman she mistreats her husband and daughters too, even as she struggles to redeem herself. The youngest of these daughters, Vivien, strives to break free of the familiar pattern before she too passes the damage on to the next generation. The Mayfield family is a hothouse of human relationships; the forces at work are fierce and fragile, formative and destructive. A remarkable novel that explores the emotional and delicate relationships between mothers and daughters, J. Jill Robinson leads the readers up to and through the life of Vivien as she attempts to escape the family’s emotional inheritance.

Originally published in 1986 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series and reissued now in hardcover alongside his masterful new novel, Empire Falls - Richard Russo's Mohawk remains today as it was described then: A first novel with all the assurance of a mature writer at the peak of form and ambition, Mohawk is set in upstate New York and chronicles over a dozen lives in a leather town, long after the tanneries have started closing down. Ranging over three generations and clustered mainly in two clans, the Grouses and the Gaffneys - these remarkably various lives share only the common human dilemmas and the awesome physical and emotional presence of Mohawk itself. For this is a town like Winesburg, Ohio or Our Town, in our time, that encompasses a plethora of characters, events and mysteries. At once honestly tragic and sharply, genuinely funny, Mohawk captures life, then affirms it.

In 1981, sixteen-year-old Sally McLean is in a car full of teenagers when it plunges through the ice to the bottom of Mistik Lake. Sally is the only survivor. Many years later, Sally's teenaged daughter, Odella, is left wondering whether the accident is to blame for her mother's life as a sad alcoholic who eventually abandons her family and flees to Iceland with another man. When Sally suddenly dies in an accident, Odella, her father and her two younger sisters are almost overwhelmed with grief and confusion, until three people provide help and healing in unexpected ways.

When her life falls apart on the eve of her 40th birthday, Kate Parker finds herself volunteering at the Lauderdale House for Exceptional Ladies. There she meets 97-year-old Cecily Finn. Cecily's tongue is as sharp as her mind, but she's fed up with pretty much everything. Having no patience with Kate's choices, Cecily prescribes her a self-help book with a difference. Food for Thought, a charming 1950s cookbook high on enthusiasm, features menus for anything life can throw at the easily dismayed. So begins an unlikely friendship between two lonely and stubborn souls-one at the end of her life, one stuck in the middle-who both discover one big life lesson: no one should ever be ashamed to ask for more.

Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy's, a small-chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged five-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter. In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate's "restructuring" to save her kitchen, while trying to learn to forgive herself and maybe allow some love back into her life. Stevie's biting, hilarious take on her own and others' foibles will make you cheer and will have you loving Misconduct of the Heart (in the immortal words of Stevie's best line cook) "like never tomorrow."

For the last five years, Ben Allan has successfully kept dromomania the peculiar male hysteria known as the mid-life crisis at bay, even writing an award-winning essay on the subject. But when his fifteen minutes of fame become a countdown to his fiftieth birthday, Ben begins to see his own life reflected in those he has written about. Goaded by his father and colleagues, Ben begins to question why his life has turned out the way it has and what exactly is stopping him from running away from everything he feels is holding him down.