A Shore Thing by Joanna Lowell
Former painter and unreformed rake Kit Griffith is forging a new life in Cornwall, choosing freedom over an identity that didn’t fit. He knew that leaving his Sisterhood of women artists might mean forfeiting artistic community forever. He didn’t realize he would lose his ability to paint altogether. Luckily, he has other talents. Why not devote himself to selling bicycles and trysting with the holidaymakers?
Enter Muriel Pendrake, the feisty New-York-bound botanist who has come to St. Ives to commission Kit for illustrations of British seaweeds. Kit shouldn’t accept Muriel’s offer, but he must enlist her help to prove to an all-male cycling club that women can ride as well as men. And she won’t agree unless he gives her what she wants. Maybe that’s exactly the challenge he needs.
As Kit and Muriel spend their days cycling together, their desire begins to burn with the heat of the summer sun. But are they pedaling toward something impossible? The past is bound to catch up to them, and at the season’s end, their paths will diverge. With only their hearts as guides, Kit and Muriel must decide if they’re willing to race into the unknown for the adventure of a lifetime.
Four Squares by Bobby Finger
In 1992, on his thirtieth birthday, Artie Anderson meets the man who will change his life. Artie spends his days at a tedious advertising job, finding relief in the corner of New York City he can call his own, even as the queer community is still being ravaged by HIV. But when his birthday celebration brings Artie and his friends to his favorite bar, a chance encounter with Abe, an uptight lawyer and Artie’s opposite in almost every way, pushes Artie to want, and to ask for, more for himself.
Thirty years later, Artie is stunned when Halle and Vanessa, Abe’s daughter and ex-wife, announce they are moving across the country. Artie has built a lovely, if small, life, but their departure makes Artie realize that he might be lonelier than he previously thought. When a surprising injury pushes Artie into the hands of GALS, the local center for queer seniors, a rambunctious group of elders insist on taking him under their wing.
Alternating between both timelines, Four Squares is an intimate look at what it means to find community at any age.
The Science of Ghosts by Lilah Sturges (text) and El Garing (illustration)
She’ll take ghosts over solving her own problems any day.
While navigating the mysteries of the afterlife, Joy Ravenna – a transgender parapsychologist, must also deal with the very real challenges of her past and present. Her first post-transition relationship, a hostile ex-wife, and clues to murder long forgotten will test her at every twist and turn. For Joy, working with ghosts is way easier than dealing with the living.
Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi
One weekend.The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city.
A party that goes awry.
A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed.Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt and glittering underworld, they’re all looking for a way out, fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them.
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
A deluxe edition of James Baldwin’s haunting coming-of-age story, with a new introduction by Roxane Gay and a stunning package.
Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin’s first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.
Make it Count:
By turns harrowing and hopeful, MAKE IT COUNT is the inspiring story of the first openly transgender woman to win a NCAA title, following her traditional upbringing in Jamaica, her fight to become a US citizen, and her efforts to achieve her Olympic dreams.
CeCé Telfer is a warrior. The first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA championship, she has contended with transphobia on and off the track since childhood. Now, she stands at the crossroads of a national and international conversation about equity in sports, forced to advocate for her personhood and rights at every turn. After spending years training for the 2024 Olympics, Telfer has been sidelined and silenced more times than she can count. But she’s never been good at taking no for an answer.
Make it Count is Telfer’s raw and inspiring story. From coming of age in Jamaica, where she grew up hearing a constant barrage of slurs, to beginning her new life in Toronto and then New Hampshire, where she realized what running could offer her, to living in the backseat of her car while searching for a coach, to Mexico, where she trained for the US Trials, this book follows the arc of Telfer’s Olympic dream.
This is the story of running on what feels like the edge of a knife, of what it means to compete when you’re not just an athlete but treated like a walking controversy. But it’s also the story of resilience and athleticism, of a runner who found a clarity in her sport that otherwise eluded her—a sense of being simply alive on this earth, a human moving through space. Finally, herself.
Paperback Releases
Home Field Advantage by Dahlia Adler
Amber McCloud’s dream is to become cheer captain at the end of the year, but it’s an extra-tall order to be joyful and spirited when the quarterback of your team has been killed in a car accident. For both the team and the squad, watching Robbie get replaced by newcomer Jack Walsh is brutal. And when it turns out Jack is actually short for Jaclyn, all hell breaks loose.
The players refuse to be led by a girl, the cheerleaders are mad about the changes to their traditions, and the fact that Robbie’s been not only replaced but outshined by a QB who wears a sports bra has more than a few Atherton Alligators in a rage. Amber tries for some semblance of unity, but it quickly becomes clear that she’s only got a future on the squad and with her friends if she helps them take Jack down.
Just one problem: Amber and Jack are falling for each other, and if Amber can’t stand up for Jack and figure out how to get everyone to fall in line, her dream may come at the cost of her heart.
