ODY New Books Collection

I Who Have Never Known Men

"Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl--the fortieth prisoner--sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground." -- Publisher's description

The Engine of Scientific Discovery

"In the early 20th century, one of biology's biggest mysteries puzzled scientists: what is the structure of DNA? The great leap forward came with the development of x-ray crystallography in 1913-a method that makes exploring the structure of molecules possible. But it was not until the 1950s when Rosalind Franklin applied this powerful method to the DNA puzzle. At King's College London, she captured the first images that revealed the missing piece: DNA's double-helix structure. (1) With the key x-ray image in hand, Francis Crick and James Watson at Cambridge quickly published their famous one-page paper in Nature proposing the double helix model in 1953. They shared the Nobel prize for the discovery together with Maurice Wilkins-a few years after Franklin passed away from cancer. It remains one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century, and it was surprisingly missed for decades." -- Provided by publisher

Dooneen

"Bartholomew Port, a writer known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that: there are no cars, there are moving footpaths, there is no church--everything seems quite queer. Invited home for a literary festival, he has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumor, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. In this futuristic city that (as if crucified on time) also breathes the old air of the Troubles, Mew fiercely misses his beloved Mootie, back home in London. An unraveling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices, a transubstantiation, and a single dream, Dooneen is the layered, allusive and wildly original new novel from Keith Ridgway, "one of Ireland's best writers, in a country with no shortage of them" (The Times)." -- Provided by publisher

Don't
Be Evil

"A whip-smart, darkly funny, and timely memoir of one woman's twelve years inside Google and her transformation from insider to dissenter as the company's ideals begin to unravel from within. When Claire Stapleton joined Google in 2007, it felt like stepping into a worldview as much as a job. The company offered not just a career, but a moral project. In the heady early years of Big Tech and when Google's in-house slogan was "Don't be evil," it was easy to believe that technology wasn't just changing the world--it was going to fix it. Stapleton quickly became known as the "Bard of Google," pulled into the rooms where the company narrated itself--writing speeches, blog posts, and executive communications for leaders including Larry Page. As she rose through increasingly rarefied roles, from the storied Creative Lab to YouTube marketing, she helped shape the myth from the inside. But as the gap between Google's ideals and its reality widened, the dissonance became impossible to ignore. In 2018, amid outrage over the company's handling of sexual harassment, Stapleton helped organize the 20,000-employee Google Walkout--a defining rupture in Silicon Valley's self-image that The New York Times called a "watershed moment in tech." Overnight, she became a public face of employee revolt--and no longer someone the company could neatly fold back into its story. Sharp, witty, and unsparing, Don't Be Evil is an insider's account of how power actually works--and a deeper reckoning with the stories we tell about work, purpose, and ourselves. In a culture that collapses identity into work, and as tech elites blur the line between private authority and public life, it asks: how much can you change from within--and when is it time to walk away?" -- from dust jacket

Daughters of the Sun and Moon

"In 1870, three Chinese women arrive in the small, dusty, and violent pueblo of Los Angeles. Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar, is entrancing and innocent, poised to fulfill her filial role by agreeing to an arranged marriage to a much older merchant. Petal, the big-footed daughter of peasants, is arriving on the shores of Gold Mountain--America--after being sold into servitude by her parents. And Moon, married to a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, is educated and beautiful, yet her failed footbinding as a child has left her with a limp that lessens her value in the eyes of many. Each woman has her own desires. Dove wants to love and be loved, Petal desires freedom, and Moon seeks justice. Together they face a ruthless society, devoid of goodwill and increasingly hostile to all three women, despite their different backgrounds. Set during a period of rampant anti-Chinese sentiment in Los Angeles, Daughters of the Sun and Moon is a gripping tale of an exhilarating but tumultuous society in a fever pitch and three women who must navigate its unique challenges. In the wake of the real-life Night of Horrors, a long-forgotten, bloody episode of American history, Dove, Petal, and Moon are brought together by hardship and heartbreak, and they must use their bravery, endurance, and ability to 'eat bitterness' to discover their voices, find freedom, and connect through solace and friendship. Together they are daughters of the sun and moon." -- Front book flap

The Daffodil Days

A stunningly inventive and poignant historical novel that follows Sylvia Plath through the final year of her life, told through the eyes of the people who knew her during her time in the English countryside. In the early 1960s in a small English town, the church bells ring. The people go about their days, catching glimpses of one another. There's the local doctor, who knows more about his patients than he would sometimes prefer. There's the young assistant at the dress shop, who understands that the ladies who come there for a new outfit are often hoping to find a new self. There are the men who ring the tower bells at the church three times a week, the notes, harmonious and clashing, rippling out across the rooftops of the town. Among all these lives, one young couple moves into focus. New to the town with their small daughter, they have escaped London for a quieter existence at Court Green, the thatched house beside the church. The life they intend to build: out of secondhand furniture stenciled with hearts and flowers, expertly cooked suppers for weekend guests, and devotion to the work that matters to them both: will be a good and happy one. The Daffodil Days depicts a pivotal year in the marriage of 20th-century literature's most infamous couple, primarily the wife: Sylvia Plath. It is a kaleidoscopic portrait of this enigmatic writer, refracted through the rich inner lives of a rural community caught, if only for a moment, in her light. Here, Sylvia is capable and charismatic, vulnerable but strong, full of spirit. For fans of literary and historical fiction, The Daffodil Days offers a poignant glimpse of a life reimagined. The lasting impression is not of what breaks us but what binds us: resilience, creativity, and love.

The Common Good Economy

Whether it's the water crisis, widespread poverty, or the next global pandemic, the problems that threaten humanity require collective action. But policymakers are confronting these problems armed with economic models that are missing one crucial element: They do not treat the common good as an objective worth achieving. In this ambitious and timely book, economist Mariana Mazzucato issues a corrective to prevailing economic thinking by defining a new theory of economics with the common good at its center. She shows how to go beyond fixing markets around the edges and instead reshape them to embody principles of reciprocity rather than extraction, and collectivism rather than individualism. It is not enough, she argues, to talk about "public goods" and the "commons"; we must truly achieve the "common good. "Drawing on wide-ranging philosophical traditions and global examples where seeds of the common good are found, Mazzucato reveals how common-good economics can help systematically transform how we build community and an economy that serves all. The Common Good Economy is a stirring call for governments, the private sector, and everyday people to act boldly to achieve the greater good.

Cages

Cuba, 1963. Felix risks everything for an illicit love affair with a co-worker. In a society where homosexuality is branded "counterrevolutionary," their tenderness unfolds in the shadow of danger, treachery, and political oppression. In London, Felix and his wife Anabel navigate exile and reinvention, while an aspiring actress named Claudia finds herself drawn into their orbit, her ambitions and desires colliding with Felix's own hunger for connection. Years later, Virgilio--Anabel's devoted brother--recounts the disintegration of Felix's marriage and his decision to step in and protect the family Felix abandoned. From Anabel, long silent about her complicity in the events that forced Felix's flight from Cuba, to Rita, the daughter born out of wedlock, each vivid character gives us a different version of Felix, and the result is a dazzling mosaic of longing, deception, survival, and reconciliation. Spanning Havana, London, and Miami over a thirty-year arc, Cages explores exile, forbidden love, fractured families, the nature of truth, and the stories we tell to make sense of the people we cannot forget.

Adrift in the South

"When Xiao Hai turned fifteen, his family paid a vocational-school teacher 1,200 yuan to find him a factory job in Shenzhen. So began a decade spent moving between the garment mills and electronics factories of China's fast-growing southern cities. Adrift in the South is a first-hand account of a life spent dodging corrupt officials and abusive employers, working long hours in brutal conditions and sleeping in overcrowded dormitories. Xiao Hai gives voice to a generation of migrant workers searching for survival, meaning and dignity in a country undergoing dramatic economic and political transformation. A landmark work from China's migrant worker literature movement, this memoir offers a rare perspective on the human cost of the country's economic rise." -- Publisher's description

1873

"From the author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Lords of Finance, another magnificent and timely reckoning with the first truly global financial calamity through the prism of the famous banking family at the center of the whirlwind Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fueling this expansion was an explosion in borrowing through the global bond market, which provided financing for the century's most costly and transformative innovation: the railroad. At the hub of the bond market stood one family-the Rothschilds. With offices in London, Paris, Vienna, and Frankfurt, and through their agent August Belmont in New York, the Rothschilds were arguably the wealthiest and most powerful family in world history, possessing an unmatched ability to mobilize capital on a massive scale and wielding unparalleled political influence. The boom predictably swelled into a series of bubbles that burst simultaneously in the early 1870s, cascading from one country to the next across Europe and the world. Governments of the major economic powers responded by blundering amid the tumult into a precipitous remaking of the global currency system-a move that not only exacerbated the ensuing economic collapse but set the stage for a prolonged twenty-year period of punitive deflation. This deflation sparked waves of populism and anti-globalization sentiment. As Liaquat Ahamed shows us in this enthralling history, the crisis of 1873 was, among other things, a death blow to Reconstruction in the United States and the proximate cause of the Ottoman Empire's slow death spiral and Britain's takeover of Egypt. Ironically, as markets grew irrationally frenzied, the Rothschilds had presciently managed to protect themselves from the worst financial effects. Nevertheless, when the deluge came, they were viciously scapegoated everywhere as part of a wider spasm of hatred directed at "Jewish finance," a strain of antisemitism that would come to full evil flower in Austria and Germany during the 20th century. 1873 is a marvelous birds-eye reckoning with the full dimension of the crisis, from its build-up to its long aftermath. Through the Rothschilds and a cast of other eyewitnesses, including Karl Marx and Mark Twain making cameos at crucial moments, we have witnesses on the ground to give us the human perspective. And we have a great and brilliant financial historian's firm grasp of the larger forces at play to create a truly cohesive global narrative with thrilling explanatory power." -- Provided by publisher

Yellow Pine

"The first time Rose fell for Miles, she was a college kid, all too eager to be swept into his sexy orbit; little wonder the relationship crashed and burned. When Miles comes back into her life two decades later, he finds a different Rose. Not only has she moved back to her beloved desert, on a homestead she's dubbed Nothingness Flats, but she's chosen to live "on the other side of the portal," with an intentionality that's brought her hard-won peace and freedom. She's navigating single parenthood, and she's found a community out at Yellow Pine, where a group of spirited misfits have mounted a stand against the corporatization of solar power. Is it worth jeopardizing all this for another chance with Miles? And yet the universe seems to be beckoning her, not only back to him but possibly toward another child. What shape might her future take, on this side of the portal? As furious, funny, searching, and searingly original as ever, in Yellow Pine Watkins blazes a trail toward a radically reimagined vision of a good life in a precarious age."-- Provided by publisher

Togetherness

From evolution to capitalism, 'survival of the fittest' has shaped our view of the world. But we got it wrong - and our mistake has brought us to the brink. For the history of life on Earth is much more than a story of competition. The natural world has been forged and sustained by small miracles of co-operation between animals and plants, insects and fungi, fish and bacteria - these partnerships are ubiquitous, lifelong and are an essential guide for a better future. In 'Togetherness', Rowan Hooper reveals the intimate connectedness of nature through these remarkable stories of symbiosis. From the female wasp venturing deep inside a fig and the intricate relationship between corals and the algae that sustain them to the symbiotic gut microbes that influence our moods, he explores how co-operation is fundamental to life itself and to protecting our shared future. -- adapted from dust jacket

Queen Mab

"In this debut novel, a new mother--a scholar steeped in fairy lore--wrestles with the legacies and madness of motherhood."-- Provided by publisher

Liberation Summer

A historical study of the events surrounding the September 1968 protests of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The book examines the women's liberation demonstrations and the first Miss Black America Pageant, exploring debates over beauty, race, gender, and politics in the United States. It places these events within the broader social and political context of 1968, including the women's movement, the Vietnam War, civil rights activism, political violence, and the presidential election. The work also profiles prominent and lesser-known figures involved in these movements and considers the lasting cultural and political impact of the protests.

It's
All River

"Lusted after by everyone she meets, Lucy is the town's most deviant and desired whore--and proud of it. But there is only one man who has captured her attention: the somber, ever-suffering Venâncio, a carpenter with a dark secret--and a wife. Once upon a time, Venâncio and Dalva, his angelic teenage sweetheart, were a shining example of marital bliss and the envy of all their neighbors--until tragedy left them estranged in their own home. But Venâncio doesn't desire Lucy the way other men in town do. In fact, he wants nothing to do with her. And if Lucy fails in seducing Venâncio, what becomes of her? Consumed by an insatiable need for Venâncio and driven mad by a growing obsession with Dalva, Lucy makes a decision that forever changes their three lives." -- Dust jacket

It Will Come Back to You

Thirteen of Sigrid Nunez's short stories in one volume. A woman can't let go of a manipulative man. A mother and daughter share a deep bond. Sisters worry about each other.

Hidden Creatures

"Dr. Dino Martins, an awarding-winning entomologist of Kenya's Turkana Basin, where life was born, unspools the hidden, squirming world of parasites-some of the most misunderstood, and important, creatures with whom we share the Earth (and our bodies!)" -- Provided by publisher

The Face

"What's in a face? And how much power does it hold? The Face begins in the historical West, where we learn how humans have interpreted faces and connected specific features with ideas of morality, social hierarchy, psychology, and so much more, setting the stage for the cultural biases that now inform our everyday interactions across the globe. We then watch how new technologies that reflect or alter our face's appearance have transformed our idea of the Self over time--from the growth of portraiture in the Renaissance and the mass production of mirrors and photography in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first century innovations like digital avatars and face transplants. And throughout, we explore the face as the cultural artifact that it is: a surface that grows, is adorned, and then displayed, influencing who we are and might become as both individuals and members of society. Readers will walk away with a new understanding of the history, power, and future of the face, alongside its role in modern identity, genetics, technology, and beyond." -- Front sleeve

Earth & Life

"From the world-renowned geobiologist and bestselling author of A Brief History of Earth, the epic story of a planetary conversation four billion years in the making. How did the world as we know it -- from the soil beneath our feet to the air we breathe and the life that surrounds us -- come to be? Geologists have proposed one set of answers while biologists have proposed another. Earth and Life is the first book to reveal why we need to listen to both voices -- the physical and the biological -- to understand how we and our planet became possible. In this captivating book, Andrew Knoll traces how all life is sustained by Earth's geological and atmospheric dynamics, and how life itself shapes the physical environment. Taking readers on a thrilling journey across four billion years of Earth history, he shows how Earth and life interact to cycle the very elements of life from rocks, water, and air, and how these and related processes control our climate, regulate our atmosphere, and support the diversification of life-forms great and small. Along the way, Knoll explains how we can draw on this history as we navigate the challenges of the Anthropocene, and how it can aid our search for life elsewhere in the universe. Blending cutting-edge science with illuminating insights from a leading expert, Earth and Life explains how this ongoing interplay holds vital lessons for us today as humanity becomes an increasingly major voice in the conversation." -- Publisher's website

Checkmate

In September 2022 the unthinkable happened: A nineteen-year-old American chess prodigy named Hans Niemann defeated the reigning world champion, Magnus Carlsen, in a stunning face-to-face match. For the hundred-thousand-plus viwers streaming the match, it seemed that an unknown had unseated a giant. Then within days, Carlsen accused Niemann of cheating--a bombshell allegation that rocked the chess world. As the scandal spiraled, Chess.com--the dominant force in online chess--launched a high-stakes investigation igniting a global media firestorm. But Checkmate is about more than a cheating scandal. It's the story of a teenager willing to risk everything to rise to the top; a reclusive genius suddenly fighting to protect his legacy; and a centuries-old game transforming into a billion-dollar industry fueled by streaming, sponsorships, and Silicon Valley power players. With exclusive access to the central figures, Ben Mezrich takes readers deep inside the weird, wild, and cutthroat world of competitive chess--where genius collides with ambition, and the wrong move could be your last. Front book flap