ODY New Books Collection

Swallows

"When a young single woman in Tokyo decides she's ready to sell anything-even her womb-to escape the precarity of her life, an agency pairs her with a wealthy couple desperate to have a child. The match seems made in heaven. She even looks a little like the wife. But is anything ever that simple? Nothing has ever gone right for Riki. She left her boring hometown in Hokkaido, where she worked at a nursing home, for a better life in Tokyo. But as a temp in the big city she has no job security, and barely scrapes by. She eats the same old discount boiled egg for lunch every day, sometimes for dinner, too. Many of her peers have to take on a side hustle just to make ends meet. So when her friend discovers an agency offering a hefty sum for egg donation, both leap at the chance for an interview. Meanwhile, former ballet star Motoi Kusaoke and his wife, Yuko, have been trying to conceive for years. After trying what feels like every available option, it seems futile-until Motoi dives deep into his research and learns that, while surrogacy is technically illegal in Japan, there is a company that's found a loophole. Before long, everyone has an opinion on the matter: from Yuko's sex-obsessed, asexual best friend, to Motoi's controlling prima ballerina mother, and even the affable sex-worker-slash-therapist that Riki has been to a couple of times, after she accepted a down-payment to be a surrogate. Acutely funny and addictively page-turning, Swallows pulls at the seams of society, reassessing our understanding of motherhood, self-worth, bodily autonomy, and class. What does it mean to be "in control"? And can money really buy happiness?"-- Provided by publisher

We Live Here Now

When visitors to a famous conceptual artist's installation start mysteriously disappearing, the aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal. Mixing illusion and reality, simulacra and replicants, sound artists and death artists, performers and filmmakers and theorists and journalists, We Live Here Now ranges across the world of weapons dealers and international shipping to the galleries and studios on the cutting edge of hyper-contemporary art. It spins a dazzling web that conveys, with eerie precision, the sheer strangeness of what it is like to be alive today.

Told You so

"From TikTok and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Mayci Neeley, a deeply personal story of love, grief, motherhood, and resilience." -- Provided by publisher

Threads of Empire

"Carpet specialist Dorothy Armstrong tells the stories surrounding twelve of the world's most fascinating carpets. Dorothy Armstrong's Threads of Empire is a spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets. Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibers from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots. In Threads of Empire, Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world's powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers' lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop. In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference, Threads of Empire uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet."-- Provided by publisher

This Kind of Trouble

"Benjamin Fletcher was good at surviving. He'd survived cancer at forty-seven, a motor bike accident at fifty-nine, a heart attack at sixty-one. Now, at sixty-seven, it seemed like the only demand life threw at him was to survive the consequences of the past. When Benjamin lands in 1960s Nigeria, hoping to explore his roots after the death of his half-Nigerian father, he falls in love with Margaret. As the two learn more about their respective histories, they realize their lineage is interwoven in the deepest of ways-their ancestors had met decades earlier, with tragic results. Unfolding over three distinct timelines spanning a century, This Kind of Trouble reveals the unsettling events that took place in a small Nigerian village in 1905 - the same events that will eventually tear Margaret and Benjamin apart 60 years later. When we meet them again in 2005, they have been estranged for decades, content to leave the heartbreaks of the past behind them. But when their grandson begins to show signs of what Margaret believes is the mental instability that has troubled her family for generations as a kind of curse, she decides the family must come together and confront the generational traumas that have shaped her and Benjamin both, and to reckon with transgressions both intimate and ancestral. Beautifully written, transporting, narratively ambitious, and featuring an unusual forbidden love story, This Kind of Trouble asks us to consider the ways we are all beholden to the past, and what we owe the future. With this debut novel, Tochi Eze announces herself as a major new literary voice in world literature." -- Provided by publisher

Sheepdogs

"Skwerl and Cheese are down on their luck. Skwerl, who is resourceful like a squirrel (Marines win battles not spelling bees), used to work for Ground Branch, the CIA's elite paramilitary wing. He was fired after a raid went bad in Afghanistan. Big Cheese Aziz, a legendary pilot-his country's Maverick-is equally hard up. The fall of Kabul has left him grounded, working the nightshift at a gas station. Skwerl recruits Cheese into an anonymous network of so-called sheepdogs, a band of Robin Hoods who operate in the shadowy space between the sheep and the wolves, protecting prey from predator and earning a buck along the way. Their mission, which Skwerl convinces a reluctant Cheese to accept, is to repossess a private jet stranded on a remote African airfield. Their fee: a commission on the jet's $5 million value. But nothing about the job adds up. Their contact goes missing. Their handler is as mysterious as the real source of the money. And when the women in their lives get involved-one pregnant wife and one dominatrix-the stakes skyrocket. From the jungles of Kampala to a glamorous hotel in Marseille, from a veteran-run pizzeria in Kyiv to a Panera in northern Virginia, Skwerl and Cheese and the players around them navigate an increasingly tangled set of loyalties. They join forces with an eccentric bomb technician turned off-the-grid survivalist, a lapsed Amish adventurer, a used car dealer elected to Congress, even a case officer known as the White Russian. Globe-trotting and page-turning, full of heart and humor, Sheepdogs is a uniquely perceptive, wild ride through the underbelly of modern war and intelligence." -- Provided by publisher

Secret Lives of the Dead

"When Jodi, BB and Matt decide to burgle a derelict country home as a thrilling dare, they become embroiled in a twisted legacy of supernatural terror. There are rumours of a bizarre curse hanging overthe hoard of antiques and jewellery within the house. And unbeknownst to the others, one member of the trio has darker motives for breaking into the property."-- Provided by publisher

The Season

"From the master of Australian letters Helen Garner comes a brand-new work of nonfiction, exploring boyhood, football, and the quotidian joys of being a grandparent. Helen Garner is one of the most "prodigiously gifted" writers of our time (The New York Times Book Review), best known for her intricate portraits of "ordinary people in difficult times" (The New York Times). In The Season, she trains her keen journalistic eye on the most difficult time of all: adolescence. Garner and her grandson Amby are deep in the throes of a shared obsession with Australian Rules football-or "footy"-as Amby advances into his local club's Under-16s. From her trademark remove, Garner documents the camaraderie and the competition on the field: the bracing nights of training, the endurance of pain, the growth of a gaggle of laughing boys into a formidable, focused team. The Season is part dispatch on boyhood, chronicling the tenderness between young men that so often scurries away under too bright a spotlight, and part love letter to parenthood and family, as Garner becomes enmeshed in the community that gathers to watch their boys do battle. Here we find Garner rejoicing in the later years of her life, utterly content and unafraid to bask in it-this is a bright, generously funny, exuberant book from one of our great living writers." -- Provided by publisher

Ruth

"In this mesmerizing and profound novel, the arc of a woman's life in a devout, insular community challenges our deepest assumptions about what infuses life with meaning. Ruth is raised in a snow globe of Christian communism, a world without private property, television, or tolerance for idle questions. Every morning she braids her hair and wears the same costume, sings the same breakfast song in a family room identical to every other family room in the community; every one of these moments is meant to be a prayer, but to Ruth they remain puzzles. Her life is seen in glimpses through childhood, marriage, and motherhood, as she tries to manage her own perilous curiosity in a community built on holy mystery. Is she happy? Might this in fact be happiness? Ruth immerses us in an experience that challenges our most fervent beliefs." -- Provided by publisher

Rocket Dreams

"A riveting, fly-on-the-wall account of the New Space Age, chronicling Elon Musk's dominant SpaceX, Jeff Bezos's resurgent Blue Origin, and the high-stakes, grit-fueled global battle to push humankind further into the cosmos-from an Emmy and Peabody award-winning Washington Post reporter."-- Provided by publisher

People like Us

"The riveting new novel by the author of the 2021 National Book Award winner and bestseller Hell of a Book."-- Provided by publisher

An Oral History of Atlantis

"In 'Machine City,' a college student's role in a friend's movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In 'Slide to Unlock,' a man comes to terms with his life, via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in 'Weird Menace,' a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a commentary track for a film from the '80s that neither seems to remember all that well. In Ed Park's utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these fifteen stories have much to say about the meaning -- and transitory nature -- of our lives. And they are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most insightful and imaginative writers working today." -- Provided by publisher

Indian Country

"Following an Indian couple, newly wed, that moves to Montana for his job, as they navigate the small-town politics and inherent racism, interspersed with flashbacks to 1800s Ganges River and Cotton River."-- Provided by publisher

The Grand Paloma Resort

"The Grand Paloma Resort is a lush paradise in the Dominican Republic where the guests enjoy incredible luxury, and the staff is always eager to please-that is, until they are pushed to the brink"-- Provided by publisher

Good and Evil and Other Stories

"Sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, here is a masterpiece of suggestiveness. Step by step these seven stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life - ourselves. Guilt, grief, and relationships severed permeate this collection - but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love, and longing, each sinister and beautiful. When something seismic happens in our lives, the waves keep coming for years after, with warning or without. Sometimes, all we can do is wait around the corner, ear pressed to the phone receiver, for them to arrive. Fantastical and subtly terrifying, these stories draw on magical realism, psychological fiction, and the dark side of fairy tales, inherited from literary predecessors like the Brothers Grimm and Jorge Luis Borges. Yet, far from antiquated or closed off, Schweblin's worlds invite us in, like quicksand or a strong river's current. These stories will insinuate themselves into your heart, and your bloodstream."-- Provided by publisher

Fonseca

"In the winter of 1952, twenty years before she publishes her first novel, just on the brink of a precipitous decline into poverty, and pregnant with her third child, the not-yet-renowned British author Penelope Fitzgerald goes to Fonseca, Mexico, with her young son Valpy at the invitation of two widowed sisters whose silver mine she hopes will be her family's saving grace. Her husband struggles with alcoholism, their literary journal is on the brink, and this is Penelope's last-ditch effort to secure material support. Financial desperation is a moral quandary for Penelope, who reveres the religious and scholarly ascetics that populate her family tree. But she longs to begin her own writing life."-- Provided by publisher

Dusk

"In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds and twins Iris and Floyd -- out of work, money and friends -- decide to join the hunt in pursuit of the bounty."-- Provided by publisher

Cryptic

"An absorbing history of Europe's nine most puzzling texts, including the biggest mystery of all: the Voynich Manuscript. Books can change the world. They can influence, entertain, transport, and enlighten. But across the centuries, authors have disguised their work with codes and ciphers, secret scripts and magical signs. What made these authors decide to keep their writings secret? What were they trying to hide? Garry J. Shaw tells the stories of nine puzzling European texts. Shaw explores the unknown alphabet of the nun Hildegard of Bingen; the enciphered manuscripts of the prank-loving physician Giovanni Fontana; and the angel communications of the polymath John Dee. Along the way, we discover how the pioneers of science and medicine concealed their work, encounter demon magic and secret societies, and delve into the intricate symbolism of alchemists searching for the Philosopher's Stone. This highly enjoyable account takes readers on a fascinating journey through Europe's most cryptic writings--and attempts to shed new light on the biggest mystery of all: the Voynich Manuscript."-- Publisher's description

Coming up Short

"From political economist, cabinet member, beloved professor, media presence, and bestselling author of Saving Capitalism and The Common Good, a deeply-felt, compelling memoir of growing up in a baby-boom America that made progress in certain areas, fell short in so many important ways, and still has lots of work to do. A thought-provoking, principled, clear-eyed chronicle of the culture, politics, and economic choices that have landed us where we are today-with irresponsible economic bullies and corporations with immense wealth and lobbying power on top, demagogues on the rise, and increasing inequality fueling anger and hatred across the country. Nine months after World War II, Robert Reich was born into a united America with a bright future-that went unrealized for so many as big money took over our democracy. His encounter with school bullies on account of his height-4'11" as an adult-set him on a determined path to spend his life fighting American bullies of every sort. He recounts the death of a friend in the civil rights movement; his political coming of age witnessing the Berkeley free speech movement; working for Bobby Kennedy and Senator Eugene McCarthy; experiencing a country torn apart by the Vietnam War; meeting Hillary Rodham in college, Bill Clinton at Oxford, and Clarence Thomas at Yale Law. He details his friendship with John Kenneth Galbraith during his time teaching at Harvard, and subsequent friendships with Bernie Sanders and Ted Kennedy; his efforts as labor secretary for Clinton and economic advisor to Barack Obama. Ultimately, Reich asks: What did his generation accomplish? Did they make America better, more inclusive, more tolerant? Did they strengthen democracy? Or, did they come up short? In the end, though, Reich hardly abandons us to despair over a doomed democracy. With his characteristic spirit, humor, and inherent decency, he lays out how we can reclaim a sense of community and a democratic capitalism based on the American ideals we still have the power to salvage." -- Provided by publisher

Boy From the North Country

"When Evan, twenty-six, is suddenly called home from his life abroad to the secluded farmhouse where he was raised by his mother, June, there is so much he does not yet know. He doesn't know his mother is dying. He still doesn't know the identity of his biological father or the elusive story of his mother's creatively intense, emotionally turbulent romance with Bob Dylan, whom Evan reveres as an artist and whom strangers have long insisted he resembles. He doesn't know the secrets of his mother's life before he was born or what drove her to leave New York City for a completely different existence."-- Provided by publisher