Shiromi Arserio

"As kids, Emily and Chess were inseparable. But by their 30s, their bond has been strained by the demands of their adult lives. So when Chess suggests a girls trip to Italy, Emily jumps at the chance to reconnect with her best friend. Villa Aestas in Orvieto is a high-end holiday home now, but in 1974, it was known as Villa Rosato, and rented for the summer by a notorious rock star, Noel Gordon. In an attempt to reignite his creative spark, Noel invites...

"From the author of The Light Over London and the "gripping, moving" (Kelly Rimmer) The Whispers of War comes a poignant and heartwrenching tale of five women in three eras, whose lives are tied together by one very special garden"--

Set in eighteenth-century Spitalfields, London, Blackberry and Wild Rose is the rich and atmospheric tale of a household of Huguenot silk weavers as the pursuit of the perfect silk design leads them all into ambition, love, and betrayal. When Esther Thorel, wife of a master silk weaver, rescues Sara Kemp from a brothel, she thinks she is doing God's will, but her good deed is not returned. Sara quickly realizes that the Thorel household is built...

"Since her award-winning debut novel, Minaret, Leila Aboulela has been praised by J.M. Coetzee, Ali Smith, Aminatta Forna, and Anthony Marra among others for her rich and nuanced depictions of Islamic spiritual and political life. Her latest collection, Elsewhere, Home, draws us ineluctably into the lives of immigrants at home and abroad as they forge new identities and reshape old ones. A young woman's encounter with a former classmate elicits painful...

"Documentary filmmaker Riley Vasher has been living a low-key life on the island of Oahu with her long-time boyfriend Brody. This all changes when Brody overhears on his police scanner that popular TV weathergirl Piper Kingsley has been murdered. When Piper's boyfriend, Ethan Jakes, is arrested for the crime, a high-profile murder trial is sure to follow--and Riley and Brody sense their chance to make a name for themselves. Riley convinces Ethan she...

"Bitsy is no one's ideal princess. She's heard it all: that it's a shame she's so plain, so lacking in grace. That the best thing for her to do is simply wait (and wait some more) and hope some prince will grant her a happy ending. Then Bitsy pricks her finger on a spindle and falls down, down, down into a world where cutthroats and con artists are more common than curtsies. Where no one ages and everyone is beautiful. Where an inscrutable evil rests...

When Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beachfront in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales reflect the condition of our oceans. Here she blends natural history, philosophy, and science to learn about whales so rare they have never been named; whale songs that sweep across hemispheres in annual waves of popularity, and whales that have modified the chemical composition of our planet's atmosphere. She takes readers...

In interweaving stories of sixteen-year-olds, modern-day Jesse tries to cope with the ramifications of her brother's death on 9/11, while in 2001, Alia, a Muslim, gets trapped in one of the Twin Towers and meets a boy who changes everything for her as flames rage around them.

Escaping from an arranged marriage, sixteen-year-old Khadija finds an unlikely ally in a poor young glassmaker's apprentice, and as a deadly revolution exploits forbidden magic, threatening their friendship, they must choose what kind of world they want to live in.

When timid Elizabeth's father takes her and her fearless friend, Zenobia, to his family home, Zenobia becomes obsessed with finding a ghost there, and then Elizabeth learns she had an aunt who disappeared from the house years ago.