ODY New Books Collection

Most Wonderful Terrible Person

"On October 7, 1964, Debra Miller's life turns upside down when her mother is arrested for the murder of her father. At only fourteen years old, Debra becomes a ward of the court, grappling with the unfathomable trauma of watching her mother's trial and conviction--a devastation that is only amplified when her family's tragedy is splashed across headlines nationwide and featured in Joan Didion's 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem'. Desperate to escape the notoriety of her family and utterly ill equipped to face the world, Debra spends her young adulthood sinking into mental illness, toxic relationships, and substance abuse. Meanwhile, her unrepentant mother, Lucille, uses Debra to supply contraband in prison. When Lucille is released, twentysomething Debra, seeking the love and support she so desperately desires, moves in with her--only to find herself constantly manipulated and dragged into her mother's illegal activities. Torn between love and survival, Debra spends years trying to escape her mother's vortex even as she battles her own demons. Ultimately, it's only when Lucille passes away that Debra finally frees herself from her grip--and realizes she needs to change her life. In this raw and poignant memoir, Debra Miller bares the scars of an adolescence and adulthood shaped by the impact of a destructive mother and demonstrates that healing is always possible--even in the face of a past that just won't let go." -- Provided by publisher

The Monuments of Paris

"A remarkable novel drawn from life about a Frenchwoman's efforts to come to terms with the legacy of her father and grandfather, both powerful forces who left a mark on their country's culture but whose incorrigible womanizing also left a complex mark on their wives and children. Violaine Huisman grew up in Paris with her beautiful, often hospitalized, manic-depressive mother--the subject of Huisman's acclaimed debut novel The Book of Mother--and her iconoclastic, flamboyant, Balzacian character of a father, a larger-than-life figure whose paternal love for his youngest daughter was as dramatically narcissistic as it was untrustworthy. The one constant in her father's personal narrative was always his obsession with the story of his childhood during the Vichy regime in France and of his father Georges, long dead, a Belgian Jew whose heroic and tragic biography had taken on the trappings of family myth. In The Monuments of Paris, Violaine Huisman has transformed these complex layers of history into an elegant and moving novel about exile and belonging, about the lies families are built on and the truths they hold dear. As the novel opens, 'Violaine' returns to Paris from her adopted home of New York City to visit her dying father for the last time. And as his conversation once again obsessively circles the story of his father's rise and fall during the war, Violaine, who always felt herself and her mother to be exiles within their own clan, becomes herself obsessed with this myth of her grandfather Georges--and especially with the nearly erased story of the most significant of his many mistresses, a beautiful and aristocratic woman named Choute. With the help of a local historian, she sets out to hunt down the truth as it might be known, and in so doing creates the necessary and deeply compelling fiction that is this singular book. In prose as elegant as it is precise, The Monuments of Paris draws a haunting portrait of twentieth-century France through the outsized ambitions, infidelities, and tragedies of the author's own family, both real and imagined." -- Provided by publisher

Like, Follow, Subscribe

"A searing investigation into the child influencer industry and the perils of childhood internet fame, Like, Follow, Subscribe is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the costs of internet fame, and the ethics of online content. What is it like to grow up with a camera in your face 24/7? To have your childhood moments sold as 'content' to millions online? What happens when someone who works in a largely unregulated multi-billion-dollar industry sells away their childhood and has no financial safety net as an adult? What does it feel like to have your private moments--your medical diagnoses, your first period, your first break up, your tantrums, potty-training, and breastfeeding-weaning--broadcast to an audience of millions? Like, Follow, Subscribe shines a spotlight on the deeply troubling world of the child influencer industry. Journalist Fortesa Latifi dives into the lives of children whose parents mine their everyday activities for monetizable content, exposing issues like privacy violations, financial abuse, and the absence of child labor protections. Through expert interviews with psychologists, labor scientists, and even former child influencers and family vloggers, she uncovers the pressures, trauma, and consequences for children thrust into the spotlight. This timely and eye-opening book doesn't just reveal the harm of toxic social media culture: it also provides a roadmap to better regulating influencer families, safeguarding children, and questioning the role of audiences in perpetuating these cycles of exploitation." -- Provided by publisher

Lázár

"At the turn of the 20th century, the Lázárs welcome their newest member in their rural summer estate, surrounded by a menacingly dark, enchanting forest. Lajos von Lázár is a baby boy with translucent skin and light-blue eyes who looks nothing like the rest of his family. Sándor, the imposing patriarch, is ashamed of his son's peculiarity. Ilona finds her baby brother quite ugly. Mária is terrified that her son's uncanny resemblance to the stagehand who died a couple weeks earlier might spell disaster. While Imre, Sándor's brother whose otherworldly foresight is often confused for insanity, is struck by visions of a great catastrophe. Lajos's birth is emblematic of the many secrets, affairs, and peculiar otherworldly happenings that plague the Lázárs. As the decades go by, they will continue to fall prey to their desires, leading grand lives, and experiencing even greater tragedies as they're swept by the tides of war and revolution that befall their country. But time and again, in the lighter years, extraordinary love and hope shine through."-- Provided by publisher

In Search of Now

"[The author] takes us on a grand tour of the latest thinking in cosmology, quantum mechanics, psychology, and neuroscience to ... explore the fundamental essence of time."--Flap page 1 of dust jacket

How It Feels to Be Alive

"Barbara Kruger once defined art as the ability “to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.” Testing that claim, Megan O’Grady takes us on a journey to explore art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world. When O’Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. When she was at the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. When she was a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether she was seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation. Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made―and often drawing on personal conversations with the artists―O’Grady traces the works’ rippling impacts, suggesting sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imagination and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does art offer? A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to consider all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template for thinking through the knottiest problems in our culture and our selves, and the connections between the two." -- Amazon

How Flowers Made Our World

"An exquisite exploration of the power of flowers, placing them at the center of the story of how evolution created the world we know today. We live on a floral planet, yet flowers don't get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their aesthetics, not their world-changing power. Inspired by the most up-to-date scientific research, David George Haskell observes, smells, and studies flowers such as magnolias, orchids, and roses, as well as fascinating but less well-known flowers such as seagrasses, to show us what we've been missing. Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural world: They used beauty to transform former enemies into cooperative partners. They reinvented plant growth, sex, and motherhood. Through radical genetic flexibility, they turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rain forests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores. Without flowers, human beings would not exist. We are a floral species, dependent on flowers for food and our habitats, as well as using flowers for beauty, scent, and culturally important rituals. Looking to the future, flowers offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change. How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing, sensual exploration, and scientific expertise to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today."-- Provided by publisher

Half City

"Welcome to Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. Keep your daggers sharp and your wits sharper. Viv Abbot is just like any other twenty-one-year-old girl. She lives in an expensive city where the rent is too high, works long hours at a thankless job, and is dating a guy she doesn't even like in the hopes of winning her mother's approval. She also happens to lead a double life as a demon hunter. After Viv's hunter father died, she became a lone wolf. Not only does she hunt deviants alone now, but everyone, including her family, sees her as an outsider...until she crosses paths with the dangerously alluring Reid Graveheart. The reformed demon tells her of a school for people like her: Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. If she enrolls, not only will she learn to hone her craft, she'll never be alone again. Though if it were that easy, wouldn't Viv's father have told her about it before he died? Viv has a deadly secret. One that she can't reveal to her new friends at Harker. Not when the school holds the answer to the many questions Viv has, from untangling the mystery surrounding her father's death to understanding her very existence. All she has to do is try not to fall for a demon and make it through her first year of school in one piece. How hard can that be?"-- Provided by publisher

Green & Deadly Things

"Centuries ago, necromancy almost destroyed the world. That's how history remembers it. History remembers it wrong. Mathaiik has trained all his life to join the sacred order of the Idallik Knights, charged with defending their world from the forces of necromancy. Only vestiges of that cursed magic remain, nothing like the fabled days of the Grim Lords, the undead wizards who once nearly destroyed the world. But when an even stranger kind of monster begins to wake, the Knights quickly prove powerless to stop them. Whole forests are coming alive and devouring anyone so foolish as to trespass, as if the land itself has turned upon humanity. It's a good thing, then, that the Grim Lords were never truly destroyed. One of their number sleeps below the Knights' very fortress. And when an army of twisted tree monsters attacks the young initiates in his charge, Math decides to do the unthinkable: he wakes her up. This is only the beginning of his problems. Because said necromancer, Kaiataris, knows something history has forgotten. The threat of this wild magic is part of a cycle that has repeated countless times-life after death, chaos after order. And if she and Math can't find a new way to balance the scales, this won't just be the end of the world as they know it, but the end of all life, everywhere."-- Provided by publisher

Go Gentle

"Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and divorcee, she lives amongst friends and culture on New York's Upper West Side, and works for the ultra-wealthy and secretive Lockwood family as a private ethics tutor for their tween boys. Her main life hack, and the key to her own enviable happiness, is to desire only what you have. Everything else life throws at you? Don't just accept it; love it. Amor Fati. Adora believes it so deeply she has it tattooed on her wrist. But when Adora meets Digby, a handsome stranger at the ballet, she finds herself loving fate indeed. But soon, she's pulled into a world of secret rendezvous, black-market art deals, and international intrigue. Driven by an unexpected and maddening desire, Adora risks reputation, job and hard-won serenity for the feelings Digby has awoken in her."-- Provided by publisher

The Geomagician

"When a Victorian fossil hunter discovers a baby pterodactyl, she vows to protect him, with the help of a fellow scholar--her former fiancé."-- Provided by publisher

Every Time We Say Goodbye

"A soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition and failure--Ivana Sajko paints a portrait of an intellectual at a crossroads. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a novel about departures, about childhood, about the end of love and about the lost idea of ​​escaping to a better place. Each chapter is one long sentence that moves from the past to the present, from the skin of a frightened boy to the suit of an adult man, from one end of Europe to the other, following the fate of a man who travels from a coastal town on the Adriatic to Berlin in order to start again. The reader joins the narrator on his journey, both on the train and in his mind--from disjointed memories triggered by his departure from home, through attempts to put his relationships and experiences in some kind of order to find meaning in them and perhaps assign blame, to confronting his most painful memories--finally arriving with him at his destination with a sense of clarity and the possibility of a new beginning. Ivana Sajko paints a portrait of an intellectual at a crossroads with stylistic care and precision."-- Provided by publisher

The Confessions of Samuel Pepys

"[Samuel] Pepys's candid revelations as he forged his career as a civilian naval official in Restoration London have fascinated readers ever since the first selection was published in 1825. This book focuses on Pepys's controversial private life and is geared for a contemporary readership by charting his varied and complex relationships with women." --Flap page 1 of dust jacket

American Fantasy

"When the 'American Fantasy' cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous nineties-era boy band and three thousand screaming women who have worshipped them since childhood. Feeling slightly out of place amid this crowd is Annie, newly divorced, fifty years old with an empty nest, and here on a lark to appease her sister. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing, something is unlocked. Call it memory. Call it nostalgia. Call it the chemical reaction of hormones, hope, and sexual reawakening. Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the familiar music, and the throngs of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she meets one of the band members--not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend--she has accessed a new sense of possibility. In a smart and incisive book packed with laugh-out-loud reflections on fame, marriage, and middle age, Emma Straub delivers a richly textured story showing us that real passion is never truly lost, that what we love makes us who we are, and that deep meaning can sometimes be found in a sea of screaming fans."-- Front jacket flap

Corto Maltese

Corto, a modern Ulysses whose wanderings in the early decades of the 20th century take him to the most fascinating places on Earth, is a hard-luck, hard-driving iconoclastic anti-hero who values freedom and independence more than wealth and status. In "Fable of Venice," a riddle from a deceased friend plunges Corto into a phantasmagorical mystery thriller that zigzags between the solidity of dreams and the fluidity of reality. A frantic chase in 1921 Venice ensues, up twisting stairs and down tangled alleys, as Corto vies against Freemasons, occultists, budding fascists, and his friend (suddenly back from the dead) in a mad scramble to secure a mystical emerald that will open the doors of forbidden magic and unravel time and space itself! -- Publisher's site

The Scent of Oranges

"Nancy has spent her whole life on the vibrant and gritty streetsof Victorian London, first as one of Fagin's child pickpockets and now on the arm of violent and mercurial Bill Sikes. Nancy does what she must to get by attuned to the harsh realities of life, but also knows how to find moments of beauty amid the grime, even if it is only the scent and taste of an orange - its miraculous colour and form. When she embarks on a relationship with enigmatic gentleman Mr Rufus, it awakens emotions she's never felt before, and makes a better life feel possible for the first time en she takes cherubic orphan Oliver Twist under her wing, something even more elusive and appealing seems to be within reach: redemption."-- Provided by publisher

Yesteryear

"Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie's followers--all 8 million of them--don't know won't hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They're sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn't simply living the good life, she's living the ideal--and just so happens to be building an empire from it. Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn't hers. Her home, her husband, her children--they're all familiar, but something's off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she's expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible. A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, 'Yesteryear' is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood."-- Publisher's website

The Witch

"Lucie comes from a long line of witches, with powers passed down from mother to daughter. Many of them have hidden or repressed their gifts to appease disgusted or fearful men. But against the wishes of her controlling husband, Lucie initiates her twins into their family's peculiar womanhood when they reach the age of twelve. In a few short months, Maud and Lise are crying rich crimson tears, their powers quickly becoming more potent than their mother's, opening them to liberation and euphoria beyond what Lucie and her foremothers ever considered. Equal parts dreamlike and disquieting, The Witch tells a tale as old as time, with a dark twist: Without looking back, children fly the nest, laying bare the tenuous threads of family that have long threatened to snap. With simmering tension and increasing panic, NDiaye's latest novel in English captures the terror and precarity of motherhood and marriage, and the uncertainty of slowly realizing that your progeny are more dangerous--to the world and to your heart--and freer than you ever could have dreamed." -- Back cover

Unfrozen

"Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway. Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds examine the state of the Arctic today, showing how the region is becoming a space of experimentation for everything from Indigenous governance to subsea technologies. Growing geopolitical competition is accompanying environmental disruption. Countries including Russia, China, and the United States are investing in the Arctic and consolidating their interests in strategic access, resource exploitation, and alliance-building. The consequences of this emerging Arctic Anthropocene are truly global--from rising sea levels due to melting glaciers to tensions between great powers determined to protect their territory and resources, and the well-being of Indigenous Peoples who have fought for centuries for rights and recognition." -- Provided by publisher

Under Water

"An intense, atmospheric novel about the devastating power of friendship, set against the backdrop of two cataclysmic events. When Marissa loses her mother at five, the most intimate relationship of her life begins. Whisked across the globe to Thailand by her oceanographer father, who is determined to channel his grief into completing his wife's research, she meets Arielle, and a fairytale friendship takes hold. During the week, the girls live at the resort owned by Arielle's parents; on the weekends they join the tight community of researchers on a nearby island they are free to explore, discovering the wonders of its reefs and forests. Together they learn to dive, to hold their breath for minutes at a time, as effortlessly synchronized as the manta rays they come to know by name. Together they learn to swim their way out of danger. But then comes a wave Arielle can't outstrip, bringing Marissa a gutting loss. Years later, Marissa, is back in New York, adrift and haunted by the memory of her friend. Over the course of a single, fateful day, as another cataclysm approaches the oblivious city, she revisits her past and, as memory washes over her, discovers how to sustain herself in a fragile world." -- Provided by publisher