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Science for the Inquisitive 2025

Black History Month

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Life's Too Short

 

"Darius has always been one of my favorite people to sing with and to call a friend in this industry and yet even knowing him well for as long as I have, there are so many incredible stories in Life's Too Short that I enjoyed learning for the first time."--Sheryl Crow

*A NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller*

A raw, heartfelt memoir from Darius Rucker, the Grammy Award- winning country music sensation and multiplatinum-selling lead singer of Hootie & The Blowfish

In 1986 Darius Rucker cofounded Hootie & The Blowfish at the University of South Carolina. What began as a party band playing frat houses and dive bars quickly became a global pop rock phenomenon through their multiplatinum-selling debut album, cracked rear view, which featured era-defining hit songs like "Only Wanna Be with You," "Let Her Cry," and "Hold My Hand." Later, Darius would chart a pioneering path as a solo country music artist, with classic anthems like "Wagon Wheel" and "Alright."

Nearly forty years after the band's formation, Darius tells his remarkable story through the lens of the songs that shaped him--from Al Green, Stevie Wonder, and KISS to Lou Reed, Billy Joel, Nanci Griffith, and so many more.

Set against the soundtrack of his life, Darius recounts his childhood as the son of a single mother in Charleston, South Carolina. He traces the unlikely ascent of his band and shares wild tales of life on the road--but he also faces his missteps, defeats, and demons. As moving as it is entertaining, Life's Too Short is a timeless book about a man and his music.

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Lovely One

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In her “vulnerable, tender, and infinitely inspirational” (Oprah Daily) memoir, the first Black woman to ever be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States chronicles her extraordinary life story.

“A billowingly triumphant American tale.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

With this unflinching account, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invites readers into her life and world, tracing her family’s ascent from segregation to her confirmation on America’s highest court within the span of one generation.
 
Named “Ketanji Onyika,” meaning “Lovely One,” based on a suggestion from her aunt, a Peace Corps worker stationed in West Africa, Justice Jackson learned from her educator parents to take pride in her heritage since birth. She describes her resolve as a young girl to honor this legacy and realize her dreams: from hearing stories of her grandparents and parents breaking barriers in the segregated South, to honing her voice in high school as an oratory champion and student body president, to graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, where she performed in musical theater and improv and participated in pivotal student organizations.
 
Here, Justice Jackson pulls back the curtain, marrying the public record of her life with what is less known. She reveals what it takes to advance in the legal profession when most people in power don’t look like you, and to reconcile a demanding career with the joys and sacrifices of marriage and motherhood.
 
Through trials and triumphs, Justice Jackson’s journey will resonate with dreamers everywhere, especially those who nourish outsized ambitions and refuse to be turned aside. This moving, openhearted tale will spread hope for a more just world, for generations to come.

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All We Were Promised

A housemaid with a dangerous family secret conspires with a wealthy young abolitionist to help an enslaved girl escape, in volatile pre-Civil War Philadelphia—“a gripping novel about standing up to impossible odds” (People, Best New Books)

The rebel . . . the socialite . . . and the fugitive. Together, they will risk everything for one another in this “beguiling story of friendship, deception, and women crossing boundaries in the name of freedom” (Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends).

BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB PICK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, She Reads

Philadelphia, 1837. After Charlotte escaped from the crumbling White Oaks plantation down South, she’d expected freedom to feel different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. After all, Philadelphia is supposed to be the birthplace of American liberty. Instead, she’s locked away playing servant to her white-passing father, as they both attempt to hide their identities from slavecatchers who would destroy their new lives.

Longing to break away, Charlotte befriends Nell, a budding abolitionist from one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest Black families. Just as Charlotte starts to envision a future, a familiar face from her past reappears: Evie, her friend from White Oaks, has been brought to the city by the plantation mistress, and she’s desperate to escape. But as Charlotte and Nell conspire to rescue her, in a city engulfed by race riots and attacks on abolitionists, they soon discover that fighting for Evie’s freedom may cost them their own.

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Go Back and Get It

"One-third of Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the slave masters who bought and sold their ancestors. In other words, one-third of Black Americans descended from slavery are descended also from sexual exploitation. Dionne Ford, whose great-grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker called the Colonel and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift, is among them. What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take and how to root it out of the body? In Go Back and Get It, Ford's debut memoir, she tells us: it manifests as alcoholism and depression and post-traumatic stress; it finds echoes in Ford's own experience of rape at the hands of a relative, and in the ways in which, much later, she builds an interracial family and manages the heartache of her daughters' racial confusion; it wracks her insides, stalling both her pregnancies. Meanwhile, Ford's preoccupation with healing is what truly sets this book apart. She tries eye-movement therapy, visits to a medium, twelve-step recovery, capoeira, a sugar- and wheat-free diet. "Anything," she writes, "to keep from going back there." But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors and uncover what about them she can to begin to feel whole. Thus begins a journey that's anguished and hopeful and strange, one that brings Ford to long-lost cousins both Black and white, to forgotten newspaper articles about her great-uncle's lynching and to abandoned gravesites, to an eBay sword that belonged to the Colonel and that she considers using as a way into the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Go Back and Get It combines the story of her inner life with research and reflections on how racial trauma is generated, repeated, stored, and processed, what the cycle looks like and how it might be broken. It is a memoir about how, in the search for belonging, family can be a source of loneliness and even danger and also a true home"--

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Promise

Two Black sisters growing up in small-town New England fight to protect their home, their bodies, and their dreams as the Civil Rights Movement sweeps the nation in Promise, a “magical, magnificent novel” (Marlon James) from “a startlingly fresh voice” (Jacqueline Woodson).

A KIRKUS REVIEWS AND CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

The people of Salt Point could indeed be fearful about the world beyond themselves; most of them would be born and die without ever having gone more than twenty or thirty miles from houses that were crammed with generations of their families. . . . But something was shifting at the end of summer 1957.

The Kindred sisters—Ezra and Cinthy—have grown up with an abundance of love. Love from their parents, who let them believe that the stories they tell on stars can come true. Love from their neighbors, the Junketts, the only other Black family in town, whose home is filled with spice-rubbed ribs and ground-shaking hugs. And love for their adopted hometown of Salt Point, a beautiful Maine village perched high up on coastal bluffs.

But as the girls hit adolescence, their white neighbors, including Ezra’s best friend, Ruby, start to see their maturing bodies and minds in a different way. And as the news from distant parts of the country fills with calls for freedom, equality, and justice for Black Americans, the white villagers of Salt Point begin to view the Kindreds and the Junketts as threats to their way of life. Amid escalating violence, prejudice, and fear, bold Ezra and watchful Cinthy must reach deep inside the wells of love they’ve built to commit great acts of heroism and grace on the path to survival.

In luminous, richly descriptive writing, Promise celebrates one family’s story of resistance. It’s a book that will break your heart—and then rebuild it with courage, hope, and love.

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Flee North

A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year

A riveting account of the extraordinary abolitionist, liberator, and writer Thomas Smallwood, who bought his own freedom, led hundreds out of slavery, and named the underground railroad, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Scott Shane. Flee North tells the story for the first time of an American hero all but lost to history.

Born into slavery, by the 1840s Thomas Smallwood was free, self-educated, and working as a shoemaker a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. He recruited a young white activist, Charles Torrey, and together they began to organize mass escapes from Washington, Baltimore, and surrounding counties to freedom in the north.

They were racing against an implacable enemy: men like Hope Slatter, the region’s leading slave trader, part of a lucrative industry that would tear one million enslaved people from their families and sell them to the brutal cotton and sugar plantations of the deep south.

Men, women, and children in imminent danger of being sold south turned to Smallwood, who risked his own freedom to battle what he called “the most inhuman system that ever blackened the pages of history.” And he documented the escapes in satirical newspaper columns, mocking the slaveholders, the slave traders and the police who worked for them.

At a time when Americans are rediscovering a tragic and cruel history and struggling anew with the legacy of white supremacy, Flee North -- the first to tell the extraordinary story of Smallwood -- offers complicated heroes, genuine villains, and a powerful narrative set in cities still plagued by shocking racial inequity today.

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Symphony of Secrets

A gripping page-turner from the celebrated author of book club favorite The Violin Conspiracy: Music professor Bern Hendricks discovers a shocking secret about the most famous American composer of all time—his music may have been stolen from a Black Jazz Age prodigy named Josephine Reed. 

Determined to uncover the truth that a powerful organization wants to keep hidden, Bern will stop at nothing to right history's wrongs and give Josephine the recognition she deserves.

“A maestro of musical mystery...Slocumb’s writing is invigorating, and the detail in his character work makes the main characters in both time periods easy to root for.... Thrilling.” —The New York Times


Bern Hendricks has just received the call of a lifetime. As one of the world’s preeminent experts on the famed twentieth-century composer Frederick Delaney, Bern knows everything there is to know about the man behind the music. When Mallory Roberts, a board member of the distinguished Delaney Foundation and direct descendant of the man himself, asks for Bern’s help authenticating a newly discovered piece, which may be his famous lost opera, RED, he jumps at the chance. With the help of his tech-savvy acquaintance Eboni, Bern soon discovers that the truth is far more complicated than history would have them believe.

In 1920s Manhattan, Josephine Reed is living on the streets and frequenting jazz clubs when she meets the struggling musician Fred Delaney. But where young Delaney struggles, Josephine soars. She’s a natural prodigy who hears beautiful music in the sounds of the world around her. With Josephine as his silent partner, Delaney’s career takes off—but who is the real genius here?

In the present day, Bern and Eboni begin to uncover more clues that indicate Delaney may have had help in composing his most successful work. Armed with more questions than answers and caught in the crosshairs of a powerful organization who will stop at nothing to keep their secret hidden, Bern and Eboni will move heaven and earth in their dogged quest to right history’s wrongs.

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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A NEW YORK TIMES READERS PICK: 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

WINNER OF THE 2024 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRIZE FOR AMERICAN FICTION

FROM ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2024

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR/FRESH AIR, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, AND TIME MAGAZINE

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023



In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

    As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

    Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.

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All the Sinners Bleed

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • USA Today Bestseller • Washington Post’s The Twelve Best Thrillers of the Year • TIME’s 100 Must Read Books of the Year • Goodreads Choice Award Nominee • USA Today’s Best Reviewed Books of the Year • BookPage's Best Mystery of the Year • Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the Year • New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Cover of the New York Times Book Review • Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List • The Financial Times’s Best Crime Books of the Year • ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Longlist • SIBA’s 2024 Southern Book Prize Finalist • Starred Publishers Weekly • Starred Library Journal • Starred BookPage • Starred Booklist 
“Fresh and exhilarating. . . Cosby keeps his eye on the story and the pedal to the metal.” —Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review

A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.

The new novel from New York Times bestselling and Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning author S. A. Cosby, "one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction.” —Washington Post.

“An atmospheric pressure cooker.” —People

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. 

With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

Charon is Titus’s home and his heart. But where faith and violence meet, there will be a reckoning. 

Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction” (The Washington Post).

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Anywhere You Run

As Seen on The TODAY Show!

Called One of the Best Crime Novels of the Year by New York Times * NPR * New York Post * Washington Post * Buzzfeed * South Florida Sun-Sentinel * Library Journal * CrimeReads

From the award-winning author of All Her Little Secrets comes yet another gripping, suspenseful novel where, after the murder of a white man in Jim Crow Mississippi, two Black sisters run away to different parts of the country . . . but can they escape the secrets they left behind?

It's the summer of 1964 and three innocent men are brutally murdered for trying to help Black Mississippians secure the right to vote. Against this backdrop, twenty-one year old Violet Richards finds herself in more trouble than she's ever been in her life. Suffering a brutal attack of her own, she kills the man responsible. But with the color of Violet's skin, there is no way she can escape Jim Crow justice in Jackson, Mississippi. Before anyone can find the body or finger her as the killer, she decides to run. With the help of her white beau, Violet escapes. But desperation and fear leads her to hide out in the small rural town of Chillicothe, Georgia, unaware that danger may be closer than she thinks.

Back in Jackson, Marigold, Violet's older sister, has dreams of attending law school. Working for the Mississippi Summer Project, she has been trying to use her smarts to further the cause of the Black vote. But Marigold is in a different kind of trouble: she's pregnant and unmarried. After news of the murder brings the police to her door, Marigold sees no choice but to flee Jackson too. She heads North seeking the promise of a better life and no more segregation. But has she made a terrible choice that threatens her life and that of her unborn child?

Two sisters on the run--one from the law, the other from social shame. What they don't realize is that there's a man hot on their trail. This man has his own brand of dark secrets and a disturbing motive for finding the sisters that is unknown to everyone but him . . .

"Anywhere You Run had me hooked from the first page... It's a novel both tender and ferocious--an absolute stunner." --Lou Berney, Edgar Award-winning author of November Road

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All That She Carried

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives.
 
WINNER: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Harriet Tubman Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, Lawrence W. Levine Award, Darlene Clark Hine Award, Cundill History Prize, Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, Massachusetts Book Award

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Slate, Vulture, Publishers Weekly

“A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
 
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. 
 
Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.
 
FINALIST: MAAH Stone Book Award, Kirkus Prize, Mark Lynton History Prize, Chatauqua Prize, Women’s Prize

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, Book Riot, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist

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Acts of Forgiveness

“A vibrant and moving debut that takes to heart our deferred dreams and the value of remaining hopeful.”—Diane Marie Brown, author of Black Candle Women

How much of their lineage is one family willing to unearth in order to participate in the nation’s first federal reparations program?

Every American waits with bated breath to see whether or not the country’s first female president will pass the Forgiveness Act. The bill would allow Black families to claim up to $175,000 if they can prove they are the descendants of slaves, and for ambitious single mother Willie Revel the bill could be a long-awaited form of redemption. A decade ago, Willie gave up her burgeoning journalism career to help run her father’s struggling construction company in Philadelphia and she has reluctantly put family first, without being able to forget who she might have become. Now she’s back living with her parents and her young daughter while trying to keep her family from going into bankruptcy. Could the Forgiveness Act uncover her forgotten roots while also helping save their beloved home and her father’s life’s work?

In order to qualify, she must first prove that the Revels are descended from slaves, but the rest of the family isn’t as eager to dig up the past. Her mother is adopted, her father doesn’t trust the government and believes working with a morally corrupt employer is the better way to save their business, and her daughter is just trying to make it through the fifth grade at her elite private school without attracting unwanted attention. It’s up to Willie to verify their ancestry and save her family—but as she delves into their history, Willie begins to learn just how complicated family and forgiveness can be.

With powerful insight and moving prose, Acts of Forgiveness asks how history shapes who we become and considers the weight of success when it is achieved despite incredible odds—and ultimately what leaving behind a legacy truly means.

Single and Thriving

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Why Not Me?

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? and creator of The Mindy Project and Never Have I Ever comes a hilarious collection of essays about her ongoing journey to find contentment and excitement in her adult life.

“This is Kaling at the height of her power.”—USA Today

In Why Not Me?, Kaling shares insightful, deeply personal stories about falling in love at work, seeking new friendships in lonely places, attempting to be the first person in history to lose weight without any behavior modification whatsoever, and believing that you have a place in Hollywood when you’re constantly reminded that no one looks like you.
 
In “How to Look Spectacular: A Starlet’s Confessions,” Kaling gives her tongue-in-cheek secrets for surefire on-camera beauty, (“Your natural hair color may be appropriate for your skin tone, but this isn’t the land of appropriate–this is Hollywood, baby. Out here, a dark-skinned woman’s traditional hair color is honey blonde.”) “Player” tells the story of Kaling being seduced and dumped by a female friend in L.A. (“I had been replaced by a younger model. And now they had matching bangs.”) In “Unlikely Leading Lady,” she muses on America’s fixation with the weight of actresses, (“Most women we see onscreen are either so thin that they’re walking clavicles or so huge that their only scenes involve them breaking furniture.”) And in “Soup Snakes,” Kaling spills some secrets on her relationship with her ex-boyfriend and close friend, B.J. Novak (“I will freely admit: my relationship with B.J. Novak is weird as hell.”)
 
Mindy turns the anxieties, the glamour, and the celebrations of her second coming-of-age into a laugh-out-loud funny collection of essays that anyone who’s ever been at a turning point in their life or career can relate to. And those who’ve never been at a turning point can skip to the parts where she talks about meeting Bradley Cooper.

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Suddenly Single After 50

A stressful, protracted divorce. A difficult, painful death of a beloved husband. And suddenly, after age 50, you're on your own again. Your children have moved out, your parents are aging fast or deceased, your friends' lives continue onward, seemingly unchanged. Being suddenly single after age 50 can be terrifying, but eventually it can also be liberating. It can be fraught with worry and decisions you're unprepared initially to make, but it can also be a time to reevaluate, reestablish, and reinvent. It can be financially and emotionally unstable at times, but it can be the start of a new chapter, or the discovery of someone you didn't know you were, or could become, after the grief of a loss so difficult.

Long-time friends and authors Barbara Ballinger and Margaret Crane have a lot in common. Both lived in the same city for years. Both are writers. Both married their husbands right out of college. Both are mothers of grown children who have left home. And both had aging parents when these difficult journeys began. Both found themselves alone, husbands lost to divorce and death, two separate situations that were equally traumatic-- for Barbara, a divorce that took four years to end, and for Margaret, a five-year, gut-wrenching siege of myriad cancers that ended in death.

Barbara and Margaret struggled but discovered not only that their new lives were, indeed, worth living, but that the insight gleaned from their experiences could help other people in similar straits. The result is Suddenly Single After 50, an honest and riveting, yet funny and poignant guide that provides advice for those who find themselves divorced, widowed, or otherwise suddenly single just about the time they start getting those AARP cards in the mail and while many of their friends are gleefully discussing retirement plans and toasting milestone wedding anniversaries.

Suddenly Single After 50 is told with authenticity, wit, and compassion. They discuss living alone, attending social events alone, eating by themselves, sleeping alone, walking and traveling alone, then how they also came to feel they were not alone, not really, with loyal friends and family. They share how their once right-sized houses suddenly felt empty, too big, and too full of stuff that no longer made sense. They write about all the legal and accounting woes that befell them. And they tell readers what it's like to be over 50 and dating again--after decades out of that scene, which had changed in unfathomable yet often hilarious ways. Suddenly Single After 50 addresses what life is really like when it's suddenly shaped as single. It helps readers understand the grief, frustration, and sadness alongside reawakening into the world. Anyone who finds themselves suddenly single in middle age and beyond--or knows someone who is--will find in these pages both advice and reflection, support, and a way forward.

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No One Tells You This

“I found myself underlining sentences, and then entire passages, that resonated with me, articulating the extreme inadequacy and sense of dislocation single women of a certain age, like MacNicol—and like me —experience in moments when others are growing closer without you…an anthem to choosing the single, family-free life.”—Amanda Stern, The New York Times Book Review

BuzzFeed: “Exciting Summer Books”
Goop: “15 Books We’re Reading This Summer”
Vogue.com: “13 Books to Thrill, Entertain, and Sustain You This Summer”
Bustle: “15 Best Nonfiction Books Coming Out In July 2018”
Town & Country: “Best New Books to Read This July”
Elle.com: “The 40 Best Books to Read This Summer”
InStyle: “11 Books to Bury Your Nose in This Summer”

If the story doesn’t end with marriage or a child, what then?

This question plagued Glynnis MacNicol on the eve of her 40th birthday. Despite a successful career as a writer, and an exciting life in New York City, Glynnis was constantly reminded she had neither of the things the world expected of a woman her age: a partner or a baby. She knew she was supposed to feel bad about this. After all, single women and those without children are often seen as objects of pity, relegated to the sidelines, or indulgent spoiled creatures who think only of themselves.

Glynnis refused to be cast into either of those roles and yet the question remained: What now? There was no good blueprint for how to be a woman alone in the world. She concluded it was time to create one.

Over the course of her fortieth year, which this memoir chronicles, Glynnis embarks on a revealing journey of self-discovery that continually contradicts everything she’d been led to expect. Through the trials of family illness and turmoil, and the thrills of far-flung travel and adventures with men, young and old (and sometimes wearing cowboy hats), she is forced to wrestle with her biggest hopes and fears about love, death, sex, friendship, and loneliness. In doing so, she discovers that holding the power to determine her own fate requires a resilience and courage that no one talks about, and is more rewarding than anyone imagines.

Intimate and timely, No One Tells You This is a fearless reckoning with modern womanhood and an exhilarating adventure that will resonate with anyone determined to live by their own rules.

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The Martian

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Brilliant . . . a celebration of human ingenuity [and] the purest example of real-science sci-fi for many years . . . utterly compelling.”—The Wall Street Journal

The inspiration for the major motion picture

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. 

Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.

After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. 

Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to kill him first. 

But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills—and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit—he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE

“A hugely entertaining novel [that] reads like a rocket ship afire . . . Weir has fashioned in Mark Watney one of the most appealing, funny, and resourceful characters in recent fiction.”Chicago Tribune 

“As gripping as they come . . . You’ll be rooting for Watney the whole way, groaning at every setback and laughing at his pitchblack humor. Utterly nail-biting and memorable.”Financial Times