Seascraper

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Susan Choi

One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences. But now it is just Anne and Louisa, Louisa and Anne, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa’s father?

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Jeffrey Eugenides

Fresh Complaint: Stories is a celebrated work by Jeffrey Eugenides (Pulitzer Prize Winner), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.

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Lynn Coady

"Karen has come home to Nova Scotia for the first time in a decade to oversee her mother’s funeral and tend to her affairs. Irene, a trained nurse, had spent her life caring for Karen’s older sister Kelli, who was born with a developmental disability. Before her death, Irene had secured a placement for Kelli at the Seaside Care Facility, but after the funeral, in a fog of guilt and grief over her neglect of Irene and Kelli over the years, Karen starts to second-guess her mother’s instructions. Not knowing which way to turn, she begins to depend on Trevor, one of Kelli’s caregivers, for both advice and support, trusting him all the more once she learns how close he was to Irene. Slowly, Trevor insinuates himself into Karen and Kelli’s lives. Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author Lynn Coady delivers a creepy and wholly compelling novel about the complex relationship between mothers and daughters and sisters, women and men, and who to trust and how to trust in a world where the supposedly selfless act of caregiving can camouflage a sinister self-interest."--

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Maggie O'Farrell

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on. A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.