Leo Season Reads
Happy Leo Season! Our list of recommended reads are all by authors with Leo birthdays— call it a pride of great books.
**Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe, Garden & Gun, Electric Literature, and St. Louis Public Radio**
The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is back with exactly the book we need in these unsettling times. Margaret Roach of The New York Times says, “Yes, please. I'll have another dose of delight.”
In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.
For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.
The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.
“A vital Southern novel that speaks to a violent American legacy.” —The New York Times Book Review
Rachel Ruskin never intended to return to her family’s tobacco farm in Shiloh, North Carolina. But when a love affair and her academic career studying Southern folklore in New York City both flame out, she has no choice. Back in her hometown in the wake of family loss, she is alone, haunted by memories of the long-ago accidental shooting death of a childhood friend, an unexplained dead wolf in her backyard, and Shiloh’s buried history of racism and violence.
Rachel tries to connect with Jewel, her late brother’s girlfriend, to build a relationship with her baby niece, Lyric. And the curious young children, Tom and Lily, who live down the road, like to keep her company. Even a flirty rekindling with her neighbor Tobias might finally make her feel part of the community. But still, she can’t escape the whispers from the town.
When another tragic incident occurs, however, Rachel can no longer avoid confronting her own past wrongs; nor can she continue to hold herself apart from her community. How can the people of Shiloh reconcile their love of hunting and their belief in tradition with the loss of more children? How can she find a way back to those she grew up loving? Drawn back into the rhythms of Shiloh and in search of a place to belong, Rachel must question everything she grew up believing and at the same time find a way to accept those around her.
Immersive, fierce, and urgently topical, Inside the Wolf is also, ultimately, a page-turning and redemptive novel that interrogates the mythology of the American past.
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
When sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller is sent to a reform camp in Montana after being involved in an armed robbery, she is thrust into a world of mountains and cowboys and miscreants. At Camp Challenge, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a camp employee of mysterious origin—an origin of constant speculation—and the chemistry between them is instant, and profound. The pair escape together into the wilderness to create an idyllic life far from the reach of the law, living off their resounding love, Lucky’s vast knowledge of the wilderness, and a little help from some friends. But they can run from the outside world for only so long, and the consequences of their naïve fantasy of a future together—and circumstances shaped by skin color—will keep them apart for decades. Will Cindra ever see her soulmate again? Or are the dark whispers true?
A page-turner full of vivid characters, delicious suspense, and ultimately joy, Lucky Turtle is a bighearted, deeply engrossing love story from one of our most entertaining and perceptive writers.
A timely, powerful story of survival set in the not-too-distant future that Margaret Renkl (Late Migrations) calls “a beautiful book…shot through with such tenderness and humanity, such love and courage and beauty and hope, that it feels almost like a prayer.”
With fires devastating much of America, Lark and his family first leave their home in Maryland for Maine. But as the country increasingly falls under the grip of religious nationalism, it becomes clear that nowhere is safe, not just from physical disasters but also persecution. The family secures a place on a crowded boat headed to Ireland, the last place on earth rumored to be accepting American refugees.
Upon arrival, it turns out that the safe harbor of Ireland no longer exists either—and Lark, the sole survivor of the trans-Atlantic voyage, must disappear into the countryside. As he runs for his life, Lark finds two equally lost and desperate souls: one of the last remaining dogs, who becomes his closest companion, and a fierce, mysterious woman in search of her lost son. Together they form a makeshift family and attempt to reach Glendalough, a place they believe will offer protection. But can any community provide the safety that they seek?
Lark Ascending is a moving and unforgettable story of friendship and bravery, and even more, a story of the ongoing fight to protect our personal freedoms and find our shared humanity, from a writer at the peak of his powers.
After her husband Alan’s decades of financial fraud are exposed, Suzanne’s wealthy, comfortable life shatters. Alan goes to prison. Suzanne files for divorce, decamps to a barely middle-class Massachusetts beach town, and begins to create a new life and identity. Ignoring a steady stream of calls from Norfolk State Prison, she tries to cleanse herself of all connections to her ex-husband. She tells herself that he, not she, committed the crimes.
Then Alan is released early, and the many people whose lives he ruined demand restitution. But when Suzanne finds herself awestruck at a major whale stranding, she makes an apparently high-minded decision that ripples with devastating effect not only through Alan’s life as he tries to rebuild but also through the lives of Suzanne and Alan’s son, Alan’s new wife, his estranged mother, and, ultimately, Suzanne herself.
When damage is done, who pays? Who loses? Who is responsible?
With biting wisdom, The Complicities examines the ways in which the stories we tell ourselves—that we didn’t know, that we weren’t there, that it wasn’t our fault—are also finally stories of our own deep complicity.