Fifteen-year-old Dominic Cantrell is focused on baseball, getting his license, the school play he’s (reluctantly) acting in, and spending time with his two best friends, Farhad Shirvani and Mia Stark. That is, until Farhad’s family’s drugstore is burgled and vandalized in what is clearly a hate crime, and the girl Dom is dating turns out …

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When Ahamed arrived in suburban Boston in 1970, she felt “an acute sense of disappointment,” she writes. “What were these quaint, old-fashioned houses doing in the land that had sent men and rocket ships to the moon?” The silence of her new home made her long for the noise and liveliness of her native India. …

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Debut author Rogers, a former financial planner, has some major problems with paper money. For one, currencies such as the United States dollar are not backed by anything substantial like precious metals; unlike years ago, when the U.S. had a gold standard, money now is issued purely on trust. This ushers in a host of …

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The family waits for the full moon that signals the beginning of Holi. To prepare, they collect wood for a bonfire, clean the house, and gather flower petals, fruits, and tea to make natural dyes. Later, the family tells stories around the fire; the next day, joined by friends and family, they playfully spray each …

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O’Neill, a University of Southern California historian, excavates the story of two East African princes who boarded a British ship with the intention of traveling to London, only to be sold into slavery in Jamaica. After years of enslavement, the princes persuaded a lawyer to help them regain their freedom, setting up the next stage …

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Lisa Owens, whose fiance’s death was never solved because of police ineptitude, became a cop, in large part, to make sure that others never experienced the pain and uncertainty that she did. Now she’s an overworked homicide detective whose boss is desperately trying to get her to focus on developing a personal life, apart from …

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Flaco, a Eurasian eagle-owl, escaped from the Central Park Zoo in February 2023 after someone cut open his enclosure. He lived free in and around Central Park—with forays to other parts of the city—eating rats, pigeons, and other small game that he caught. The zoo tried to recapture him but ceased its efforts after public …

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Rich girl Harsha Godbole is trying to make it as a photographer in India’s Silicon Valley without her wealthy parents’ help. But when her movie-industry-raised cousin announces her wedding, Harsha lies about her newly single status to save face. Her solution is to pay her local barista to pretend to be her boyfriend for the …

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Lila Kennedy thought she had the perfect family—a loving mother, a doting stepfather, two wonderful daughters, and a great husband. She even wrote a self-help book about repairing a marriage, which was published a mere two weeks before her husband left her. After her own mother’s sudden death, Lila finds herself an unexpected single mom …

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A curious, tan-skinned, curly-haired child in a wide-brimmed hat follows a path into the forest, heeding its siren call. Along the way, the unnamed youngster discovers the calming sensory experiences of nature and all that it has to offer, from the way “the branches rustle, strange and stirred” to the way “the leaves kick’d by …

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