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The Expat
by Hansen Shi
A fresh and vivid new voice brings a contemporary edge to the classic espionage novel.
At 26, Princeton grad Michael Wang is trapped. Working at General Motors, he’s straining against the bamboo ceiling, quietly and doggedly at work on a piece of innovative self-driving car technology that he hopes will catapult him out of obscurity. In life he’s dogged by resentment—of the Ivy Leaguers who never accepted him, of a mother and a vanished father who let the very particular gravity of life in America crush them, and of a country that’s eager to perceive him as quiet, complacent and less-than.
But all that changes when one night, on a freelance coding platform, he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Vivian. She’s been admiring Michael’s work from afar, and represents a Beijing-based startup that’s eager to poach him, liberate his ideas from the stifling confines of GM, and help him find success in the wilder, less regulated business environs of China.
For Michael—lonely, ill-used, and unappreciated—it’s no choice at all. But when Vivian vanishes shortly after his arrival in China and the true nature of his new position is made brutally clear, Michael finds himself out of his depth and enmeshed in a dangerous web of industrial espionage and counterintelligence. Caught between two countries that view him as a pawn, where do his loyalties lie?
The Expat brilliantly explores the myth of meritocracy, high-tech immigration, US-China conflicts, identity, and disaffection to ask the question: in the pursuit of self-actualization, who will we betray and how far will we go?
Ordinary Human Failings
by Megan Nolan
When a 10-year-old child is suspected of a violent crime, her family must face the truth about their past in this haunting, propulsive, psychologically keen story about class, trauma, and family secrets from “huge literary talent” (Karl Ove Knausgaard) and internationally bestselling author Megan Nolan.
It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" -- ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star seems set to rise when he stumbles across a sensational a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents beloved across the neighborhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and “bad apples”: the Greens.
At their heart sits beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.
The Hidden Book: A Novel
by Kirsty Manning
From bestselling author Kirsty Manning comes a stunning novel based on a true story of clandestine courage in World War II as prisoners of war risk their lives to secure evidence of Nazi atrocities—and how one man concealed it for decades before passing it on to his family who struggle to understand their inherited legacy of trauma. Austria, 1940 Yugoslavian Nico Antonov is just one of more than 200,000 people imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp near the Danube River. Malnourished and forced into hard labor in a quarry, he still defies his captors any way he can. When fate brings him into contact with Lena Lang, a young woman living with her family in fear of their Nazi occupiers, he finds an ally. SS officers have charged Spanish POW and photographer Mateo Baca with recording the events and prisoners of Mauthausen and to make five copies of the collected photo book for the Third Reich’s leaders. But Mateo also creates a sixth book to be smuggled out of the camp—where Nico entrusts Lena to hide it and protect their secret. Australia, 1980s to present When teenager Hannah Campbell discovers her grandfather Nico’s mysterious photo album, filled with horrific visions of suffering and cruelty, the barbarities of World War II no longer feel like ancient history. Haunted by the images for years, as a university student and a married young mother, she pursues the truth behind her grandfather’s incarceration. As Hannah experiences love and loss in her own life, she comes to understand how the photos not only capture history but reflect a shared humanity that must never be forgotten.
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