Collection: Shop Woman

From the author of The Littlest Library--a heartwarming novel about a widowed children's book author who moves into a cottage in the English countryside and finds herself face-to-face with the handsome and brooding blacksmith who lives next door.

In her books she can write "happily ever after"--but real life? That's another matter...

For children's book author Imogen, an idyllic life in the English countryside seems like the perfect fit for her and her husband. But when tragedy strikes, Imogen is left widowed, and finds herself moving into Storybook Cottage alone with only her monstrously narcissistic cat for company.

After discovering she is pregnant, Imogen grows determined to embrace a new start in Middlemass, with its duckpond, cricket matches and village fêtes. The only thing Imogen can't seem to shake is her neighbor--a brooding, artisan blacksmith named Zach--who she can't quite decide is friend or foe. That is until she realizes, thanks to an arcane clause in her deeds, that Zach is not just an artist, but lord of the local manor house.

He has the power to take her home and leave her completely broke. Devastatingly--he seems keen to do exactly that. Yet, Imogen finds herself drawn to him nonetheless. And in her darkest hour, Zach may just be the bright spot to save Imogen in more ways than one.

This collection is a story about the perseverance of the self and the strength of the community; the inevitability of becoming broken and beaten; the reminder that we are connected and we are exquisite; that our scars show where we did not die: and that when we are underestimated, bloodied, and battered, we will rise again.
Both personal and communal, drawing strength specifically from the Yazidi people through her time in Iraq - Maia tries to make sense of the utterly unimaginable and the all too common, so that the reader may take solace in exploring the beauty and depth of their own sheer strength in the face of pain and anguish.
The universe will always promise brutality and struggle.
Individuals will always possess the power of resilience.
Humanity will always offer a future.

The Song of Achilles and Circe get a sapphic, young adult twist in this "exciting, richly textured, thought-provoking" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) retelling of the myth of Arachne spun in moving verse.

Arachne is a homely girl with no claims to divinity or fortune, ostracized by all but her family and closest friend, Celandine. Turning to her loom for solace, Arachne learns to weave, finding her voice and her strength through the craft. After a devastating loss, Arachne and Celandine flee to the city of Colophon, where Arachne's skills are put to the test. Word of her talent spreads quickly, leading to a confrontation with the goddess Athena, who demands that Arachne repent for her insolence and pride.

But Arachne will not be silenced. She challenges Athena, and a fateful weaving contest ensues, resulting in an exposé of divine misdeeds, a shocking transformation, and unexpected redemption.

A brilliant weaver of words, author Rebecca Caprara transforms an ancient myth into a sweeping novel in verse, unraveling the tales that frame Arachne as a villainess and delivering a timely story of long-awaited justice.

"A five course feast of longing, banter, gourmet cooking, heaps of spice, and a cherry on top happily ever after. I devoured this fake dating, celebrity chef romance." --Erin La Rosa, author of Plot Twist and For Butter or Worse

Business or Pleasure meets Evvie Drake Starts Over in this delicious opposites-attract romance from debut author Sarah Chamberlain.

Sometimes the perfect recipe just needs a little extra heat.

Ellie Wasserman's life is neat and tidy, and that's exactly how she wants it. Really. A top ghostwriter for celebrity cookbooks, she was widowed three years ago and has no interest in taking chances-- not on writing her own cookbook, not on telling her still-grieving in-laws she wants to move out, and certainly not on dating, which is about as intimidating as a recipe with fifty steps.

Kieran O'Neill isn't known for being organized. An up-and-coming chef who scored big on a reality television competition, he's been the guy who cracks jokes and makes messes--something his chilly family has never let him forget. The only place he feels truly capable is at the stove. But when he's paired with an uptight ghostwriter with cool blue eyes and distracting curves to write his debut cookbook, she shreds his class clown act like a paring knife cuts an orange peel.

As Ellie and Kieran are forced to work closely together in a hot kitchen for weeks on end, their sharp edges and harsh judgments slowly soften and sweeten into a wildly delicious attraction. Long, steamy days turn into even steamier nights, but they have to face their painful pasts to know if this tender new love can transform into something lasting.

"A romance as sharp as it is sweet. Fans of Emily Henry will devour this delectable story of love lost and found." --Cecilia Rabess

A dazzlingly ambitious history of the ancient world that places women at the center--from Cleopatra to Boudica, Sappho to Fulvia, and countless other artists, writers, leaders, and creators of history

Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women--whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power--were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it.

In this monumental work, Dunn reconceives our understanding of the ancient world by emphasizing women's roles within it. The Missing Thread never relegates women to the sidelines and is populated with well-known names such as Cleopatra and Agrippina, as well as the likes of Achaemenid consort Atossa and Olympias, a force in Macedon. Spanning three thousand years, the story moves from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, from Lesbos to Asia Minor, from the Persian Empire to the royal court of Macedonia, and concludes with Rome and its growing empire. The women of antiquity are undeniably woven throughout the fabric of history, and in The Missing Thread they finally take center stage.

When Dani returns home after a divorce, she's just looking for a place to hide from her ex and lick her wounds. The neglected house on her parents' property seems like the perfect project to occupy her time. But when Dani starts to experience things she can't explain, she must face the reality that not everyone is quite as they appear. Starting over means a new home, new friends, and new information about her family. Will Dani find the peace she's after, or will family secrets and a persistent ex keep her from building a new life?

Three generations of fiercely strong and stubborn Mexican American women face grief head-on as they attempt to shed generational trauma and discover the true meaning of home in this lyrical novel that features magical realism in the tradition of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina and The House of the Spirits.

For generations, the Olivares women have sought to control their daughters' destinies, starting with their names. In life, Olvido constantly clashed with her carefree daughter. Then teenage Angustias discovered she was pregnant and left her mother's home in search of her own. Ten years later, Felicitas finally meets her estranged grandmother and is terribly disappointed when Olvido is nothing like a grandmother should be. She is strict, cold, and...dead.

Now, Olvido is convinced the only way her spirit will cross over is if she resolves her unfinished business--to make sure Angustias is in a better place regarding family, job, husband, and God, but maybe not in that order--and Felicitas is the only person who can see or hear her. Heartbroken about her mother's passing and desperate to put Olvido's tiny Texas home in her rearview mirror as quickly as possible, Angustias doesn't understand why suddenly everyone in town seems to be conspiring to set her up with every eligible bachelor in town, offer her jobs, and invite her and Felicitas to church every Sunday.

As Olvido attempts to puppeteer her granddaughter to "fix" Angustias's life from beyond the grave, Angustias tries desperately to find a better place for Felicitas, and Felicitas struggles to keep her ability to see the dead a secret from Angustias, all three Olivares girls are forced to learn how to actually listen to one another, to work to overcome generations' worth of well-intentioned mistakes and learn the true definition of home.

'A gorgeous story full of emotion and a very special library.' - Evie Woods, bestselling author of The Lost Bookshop

Some stories stay with us forever...

For forty-two years, Sally Harrison has been building a library.

Each year, on her daughter's birthday, she adds a new book to her shelves - with a note in the front dedicated to her own greatest work.

But Ella - Sally's only child - fled to Australia twenty-one years ago after a heated exchange, and never looked back. And though Sally still dutifully adds a new paperback to the shelves every time the clock strikes midnight on July 11th, her hopes of her daughter ever thumbing through the pages are starting to dwindle.

Then disaster strikes and Ella is forced to return to the home she once knew.

She is soon to discover that when one chapter ends, another will soon follow.

All you have to do is turn the page...

Journey through the pages of this heartwarming novel, where hope, friendship and second chances are written in the margins. Perfect for book lovers everywhere and fans of Sally Page's The Keeper of Stories.

Praise for The Memory Library:

'An absolute joy to read. Uplifting, beautiful, and perfect for any book lovers!' Reader review, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'The Memory Library delivers on its promise of hope, friendship and second chances. It's a love letter to the written word.' Reader review, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'A powerful and poignant story. There were tears shed.' Reader review, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'I laughed out loud and had more than one glassy eye!' Reader review, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'A real treasure for booklovers everywhere who completely appreciate the joy, knowledge and healing that books can bring.' Reader review, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'There's page after page of wonderful wisdom in this novel.' Reader review, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Filled with tender moments of sharing, tears, forgiveness, revelation and healing.' Reader review, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'What a beautiful, moving story this was! It really had me sobbing my eyes out.' Reader review, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

"A book that will stay with the reader long after the last page. Absolutely brilliant." --Kristan Higgins, New York Times bestselling author

"This drama-packed page turner will warm your heart!" --Eliza Knight, USA Today bestselling author of The Mayfair Bookshop

When life rewrites the story, only friendship will see them through.

After years of hard work, four best friends--Celeste, Yasmeen, Toni and Leslie--are finally on the verge of opening the bookstore of their dreams. A place where their community can find solace with an intriguing new read, a comforting beverage and book-loving friends.

But before they can cut the ribbon, their worlds are upended.

Toni receives devastating news just months before her wedding, while Celeste's struggling marriage threatens to collapse completely. Leslie learns a shocking secret about her family, and a lotto ticket changes Yasmeen's life--but not for the better.

As the bookstore's grand opening fast approaches, the four women must lean on each other now more than ever to navigate their grief and uncertainty. And together, they'll learn that sometimes, even life's most unexpected plot twists can lead to beautiful new beginnings.

A young widow grapples with the arrival of a once-in-a-lifetime comet and its tumultuous consequences, in a debut novel that blends mystery, astronomy, and romance, perfect for fans of Emma Cline's The Girls and Ottessa Moshfegh's Death in Her Hands.

Sylvia Knight is losing hope that the person who killed her husband will ever face justice. Since the night of the hit-and-run, her world has been shrouded in hazy darkness--until she meets Theo St. John, the discoverer of a rare comet soon to be visible to the naked eye.

As the comet begins to brighten, Sylvia wonders what the apparition might signify. She is soon drawn into the orbit of local mystic Joseph Evans, who believes the comet's arrival is nothing short of a divine message. Finding herself caught between two conflicting perspectives of this celestial phenomenon, she struggles to define for herself where the reality lies. As the comet grows in the sky, her town slowly descends further and further into a fervor over its impending apex, and Sylvia's quest to uncover her husband's killer will push her and those around her to the furthest reaches of their very lives.

A novel about the search for meaning in a bewildering world, the loyalty of love, and the dangerous lengths people go to in pursuit of obsession, Bright Objects is a luminous, masterfully crafted literary thriller.

The funny and insightful first-person story of the trailblazing movie director of the 80s and 90s whose fearless punk drama, "Smithereens" became the first American indie film to compete at Cannes, and smash hit "Desperately Seeking Susan" led to a four-decade career in film.

Starting out in the mid-70s, a time when few women were directing movies, Susan was determined to become a filmmaker. She longed to tell stories about the unrepresented characters she wanted to see on screen: unconventional women in unusual circumstances, needing to express themselves and maintain their autonomy.

Her genre-blending films reflect a passion for classic Hollywood storytelling, mixed with a playful New Wave spirit, informed by her years living in downtown NYC.

Seidelman continued to shape American pop culture well into the nineties, directing the pilot of the iconic TV series "Sex And The City," focusing her sharp lens on the changing place of women in American society and helping to fundamentally reshape our self-image in ways that are still felt today.

BOOK DETAILS:

Raised in the safe cocoon of 1960s suburbia, Susan Seidelman wasn't a misfit, an oddball, or an outlier. She was a "good-girl" with a little bit of "bad" hidden inside. A restless teenager, she dreamed of escape and reinvention, a theme that would play out in her films as well as in her own life. Because she loved stories, a high school guidance counselor suggested she become a librarian, but she had her sights set further afield. In 1973, she left the Philly suburbs, enrolled at NYU's burgeoning graduate film school and moved to NYC's Lower East Side. There, she found herself in the right place at the right time. New York City was falling apart, but out of that chaos came a burst of creative energy whose effects are still felt in American pop culture today. Downtown became a vibrant playground where film, music, performance and graffiti art cross-pollinated and where Seidelman chronicled the lives of the colorful misfits, oddballs, dreamers and schemers she met there.

It's all in DESPERATELY SEEKING SOMETHING. Seidelman not only has a keen perspective on the times she's lived through -- from her Twiggy-obsessed girlhood, through the Women's Lib movement of the early 70s, the punk scene of the late 70s, Madonna-mania of the 80s, to the dot-com "greed is good" 90s, and beyond--she tells great stories.

"This book has it all. Humor, heart, and a heroine I was desperately rooting for. Kirsty Greenwood has a new fan!"
--Colleen Hoover, New York Times bestselling author

A recently deceased woman meets "the one" in the afterlife waiting room, scoring a second chance at life (and love!) if she can find him on earth before ten days are up...

If she wasn't dead already, Delphie would be dying of embarrassment. Not only did she just die by choking on a microwaveable burger, but now she's standing in her 'shine like a star' nightie in front of the hottest man she's ever seen. And he's smiling at her.

As they start to chat, everything else becomes background noise. That is until someone comes running out of a door, yelling something about a huge mistake, and sends the dreamy stranger back down to earth. And here Delphie was thinking her luck might be different in the afterlife.

When Delphie is offered a deal in which she can return to earth and reconnect with the mysterious man, she jumps at the opportunity to find her possible soulmate and a fresh start. But in a city of millions, Delphie is going to have to listen to her heart, learn to ask for help, and perhaps even see the magic in the life she's leaving behind...

A fascinating investigation into the lucrative, minimally regulated, fast-growing industry of egg freezing, from a young reporter on a personal journey into the world of cutting-edge reproductive medicine

Ovaries. Most women have two; journalist Natalie Lampert has only one. Then, in her early twenties, she almost lost it, along with her ability to ever have biological children. Doctors urged her to freeze her eggs, and Lampert started asking questions.

The Big Freeze is the story of Lampert's personal quest to investigate egg freezing, as well as the multibillion-dollar femtech industry, in order to decide the best way to preserve her own fertility. She attended flashy egg-freezing parties, visited high-priced fertility clinics, talked to dozens of women who froze their eggs, toured the facility in Italy where the technology was developed, and even attended a memorial service for thousands of accidentally destroyed embryos.

What was once science fiction is now simply science: Fertility can be frozen in time. Between 2009 and 2021, nearly 100,000 women in the United States opted to freeze their eggs. Along with in vitro fertilization, egg freezing is touted as a way for women to "have it all" by conquering their biological clocks, in line with the global trend of delaying childbirth. A generation after the Pill, this revolutionary technology offers a new kind of freedom for women. But does egg freezing give women real agency or just the illusion of it?

A personal and deeply researched guide to the pros, cons, and many facets of this wildly popular technology, The Big Freeze is a page-turning exploration of the quest to control fertility, with invaluable information that answers the questions women have been afraid to ask--or didn't know they should ask in the first place.

The debut poetry collection from Lyndsay Rush (aka @maryoliversdrunkcousin) is a humorous and joyful celebration of big feelings, tender truths, and hard-won wisdom, for fans of Maggie Smith, Kate Baer, and Kate Kennedy.

At long last, a book of poetry for people who didn't even know they liked poetry. And they're in good company: author Lyndsay Rush didn't know she liked it either. That is, until she embarked on an internet experiment under the Instagram username @MaryOliversDrunkCousin that turned into a body of work that struck a chord with women across the country; thanks to her signature wordplay, witticisms, and--against all odds--wisdom.

With titles like "Shedonism", "Someone to Eat Chips With", "It's Called Maximalism, Babe", and "Breaking News: Local Women Gets Out of Bed", Rush's debut collection of poetry uses humor to grapple with the female experience--from questioning whether or not to have children, to roasting the patriarchy, to challenging what it means to "age gracefully"--and each piece delivers gut-punching truths alongside gratifying punchlines. Readers walk away from Lyndsay's work feeling seen, celebrated, and wholly convinced that joy is an urgent, worthwhile pursuit.

With over 140 convention-bending poems--most of which are never-before-seen--this book is quite literally A Bit Much.

THE FIRST NOVEL BY THE AUTHOR
OF WORD-OF-MOUTH BESTSELLER IF
WOMEN ROSE ROOTED 'You and me against the
world, you used to sing. In the days before it became you and me against
each other.'Cat Munro - who has never taken
a day off in her working life - quits her corporate job and starts flying
lessons in a small plane over the Arizona desert, confronting her fear not only
of death, but of life. Her mother, Laura, moves back to the Scottish village
where she spent the first years of her marriage to Cat's abusive father. Though
they are apart, the past connects mother and daughter, haunts them, binds them.
From the excoriating heat of
the Arizona desert to the misty flow of a Highland sea-loch, Sharon Blackie's
soaring first novel presents us with the transformative power of landscape, and
of storytelling, in women's lives. Above all, The Long
Delirious Burning Blue is a story of courage, endurance and redemption.

'It is
that rarity, a first novel that smacks of not merely confidence, but authority
... The ending is powerful,
filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but
rarely reach.' The Scotsman

Before the Silk Road had a name, nomads roamed the Asian steppes and women fought side by side as equals with men. Like all women of the Sauromatae, Akmaral is bound for battle from birth, training as a girl in horsemanship, archery, spear, and blade. Her prowess ignites the jealousy of Erzhan, a gifted warrior who hates her as much as he desires her. When Scythian renegades attack, the two must unite to defeat them. Among their captives is Timor, the rebels' enigmatic leader who refuses to be broken, even as he is enslaved. He fascinates Akmaral. But as attraction grows to passion, she is blinded to the dangerous alliance forming between the men who bristle against the clan's matriarchal rule. Faced with brutal betrayal, Akmaral must find the strength to defend her people and fulfill her destiny. Drawn from legends of Amazon women warriors from ancient Greece and recent archaeological discoveries in Central Asia, AKMARAL is a sweeping tale about a powerful woman who must make peace with making war.