The Pale King

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Karen Russell

The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline. And Swamplandia!, the family's island home and theme park, in the Florida Everglades, has sophisticated competition - The World of Darkness. Ava is a resourceful, but terrified twelve-year-old, who must manage seventy gators, and the vast landscape of her grief. Her mother, Swamplandia!'s star attraction, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her Grandpa has been sent to an old folk's home; her brother has defected to The World of Darkness to keep the family afloat; and her father is AWOL. To save them, Ava must journey on her own to a perilous part of the swamp called the Underworld, a harrowing odyssey from which she emerges a true heroine.

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Heather ONeill

Daydreams of Angels by Heather ONeill is an acclaimed literary masterpiece celebrating major critical honors and timeless storytelling.

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Claire Messud

Relegated to the status of schoolteacher and friendly neighbor after abandoning her dreams of becoming an artist, Nora advocates on behalf of a charismatic Lebanese student and is drawn into the child's family until his artist mother's careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal.

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Harry Thompson

The year is 1828. Brilliant young naval officer Robert Fitzroy is given the captaincy of HMS *Beagle*, surveying the wilds of Tierra del Fuego, aged just twenty-three. But Fitzroy hides a dark secret: hereditary manic depression that can strike at any time. He is seized by two ambitions -- that he can prove, contrary to the spirit of the age, that black and white men are equal; and that he can prove the truth of the Book of Genesis. To this end, he takes a passenger: a young trainee cleric and amateur geologist named Charles Darwin. This is the story of a deep friendship between two men, and the twin obsessions that tore it apart, leading one to triumph and the other to disaster... *This Thing of Darkness* is not just an epic historical novel. By turns gripping, funny, satirical and heartbreaking, it is also a novel about race, religion, science and colonialism that sheds many a light on the state of our world today. It is also one of history's great untold true stories, a tale of men under sail who were prepared to risk their very lives to get at the truth.