Kirjahaku

In 1985, the shooting of Mr. Marfeo disrupts the quiet suburban neighborhood of Maple Bay and prompts thirteen-year-old Zinnia Zompa to reorganize everything she knows about her parents—their preoccupations, obsessions, and above all, their battles with each other. As her understanding of the world grows, Zinnia sees how the violence she witnesses is part of a larger pattern of domination, one that shadows the world far beyond her neighborhood, and her coming-of-age means reckoning with this darkness.

Diane Josefowicz's debut novel, READY, SET, OH, is set against the upheavals of the Sixties and chronicles the struggles of a man who has just lost his draft deferment, a young pregnant woman with fragile mental health, and a UFO-chasing astronomer, each hostages in their own way to their families and to history.Providence, Rhode Island, 1967, Tino Battuta returns home from medical school in disgrace and without his draft deferment to attend his grandfather's funeral and to spend time with the love of his life, Primrose Tirocchi. Primrose, an art student, has an abusive home life and serious mental health challenges. But Primrose has plans: she is writing The Book of Love with her best friend while dreaming about living in New York and showing her art in galleries. Tino has a dream as well: to escape the war. Complicating matters, Primrose is soon carrying Tino's baby. Tino isn't giving her the ring she wants, but Primrose isn't so sure about their relationship either. Soon Primrose falls for Lupo Light, a budding astronomer with a deferment, who is caught up in a popular movement to link political liberation to a wave of UFO sightings. While Tino and his best friend work on a boat that could be their ticket to Canada, Primrose joins the Students for a Democratic Society while trying to keep a grasp on her tenuous mental health. Together, Primrose and Tino discover the limits of their finite possibilities as well as the fragility of their resilience. Ultimately, they must confront the question: how much choice do we really have in the paths our lives take?

A literary take on the locked-room mystery following a woman who makes miniatures of murder scenes, from a scintillating new voice in crime fiction Hannah "Cookie" Cooke, an interior decorator with a sideline making miniature reproductions of crime scenes, lands her dream job when New Preston's wealthiest couple hires her to renovate their historic New England home. But things go spectacularly wrong when her client, Chuck, is murdered at the housewarming party. The detective on the case is sure the key to the baffling murder is hiding in one of Cookie's miniatures. Complicating matters further, Cookie's mother, a retired archaeologist living in a local rehabilitation and nursing facility, knows more than she's willing or able to admit about the house and its history--in particular, why there's a hidden room decorated in 19th-century Egyptian kitsch on the premises, and what it might mean for the current owners. This character-driven contemporary take on classic noir spins themes of possession, consumption, and development into a twisty, one-of-a-kind mystery.

We're born unfinished, in need of everything-love, food, attention, care. The linked stories in Guardians & Saints explore the ways in which modern orphans fail to thrive. A girl loses her mother only to re-find her, in altered form, in a grim institutional afterlife. A group of friends spins helplessly around the death of a beloved teacher when his selfless pedagogy is called into question. Faced with the incapacity of those they depend on, Diane Josefowicz's characters appeal, with varying degrees of success, to stand-ins: teachers, mentors, therapists, guardians, and, occasionally, saints.