The Daffodil Days

by Helen Bain

Helen Bain's remarkable debut novel, The Daffodil Days, builds a slantwise biographical portrait of Sylvia Plath through her interactions with friends and acquaintances in the last years of her life.

Like linked short stories, the 16 chapters adopt the points-of-view of various secondary characters (e.g., Plath's housekeeper, riding teacher, and brother), but the kernel of each is an encounter with Plath or a memory that illuminates her personality and state of mind. Writer Al Alvarez visits her tranquil southwest

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A Real Animal

by Emeline Atwood

Emeline Atwood's debut is an ethereal, anxious coming-of-age novel that captures the relationship between unease and conviction for one woman in her 20s. After experiencing a sexual assault, college senior Lucy wakes one morning and scales a tree, convinced she's a leopard. Once she returns to herself, her mother takes her back to her childhood home, where their hot-and-cold relationship spurs a total upheaval. Lucy dumps her boyfriend, changes cities, and falls into an isolating and abusive relationship with

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This Immortal Heart

by Jennifer Saint

The ancient Greek goddess of love tells her story over the course of several mortal lifetimes in the ardent, spellbinding mythic fantasy This Immortal Heart by Jennifer Saint (Hera; Ariadne).

Aphrodite can hear the secrets of mortal hearts, "every tentative hope, every forbidden want, every fragmented gasp of passion, and to [her] they are poetry." Her role on Mount Olympus is to grant the prayers of lovers, and she takes her duties and followers seriously. Life on Olympus is a political minefield of feuds

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The Assassin's Guide to Dating

by Natalie C. Parker

Lila Morgan, who wants one uninterrupted date with her girlfriend, Tru, must clap back against her oppressive employer and outwit a ruthless crime boss in The Assassin's Guide to Dating, the splashy, superpowered sequel to the YA thriller The Assassin's Guide to Babysitting by Natalie C. Parker.

Underhill is an underground organization responsible for keeping individuals with superpowers ("talents") in line. Two months ago, a bombshell (a person with explosive powers) tried to destroy Underhill--and nearly

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Augusta Pine Does Not Exist

by Emily Lloyd-Jones

In this high-stakes, adrenaline-inducing thriller by Emily Lloyd-Jones (The Wild Huntress), an 18-year-old hacker in the near future must face off against a group of cyberterrorists.

A 15-year-old's hack goes fatally wrong and she's given a choice: face the consequences or be declared dead and work for the government under a new identity. Three years later, "Augusta Pine" is still working for the Identity Security Division as a wraith, an undercover agent who is able to "ghost through the world" as she helps

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