High Wire Darlings

We all feel the cracking in our bones, the strain of our hearts, and the aching that comes with growing up. Loving, love lost, adventure, a hunger for home (whatever "home" means), nostalgia, angst. We all just want someone to look us in the face and say, "I know exactly how you feel." And that is precisely what "High Wire Darlings" is here to tell us.

A Bonfire of the Vanities for our times, by an author who “knows her way around 21st-century wealth and power” (The Wall Street Journal). Since he married Merrill Darling, daughter of billionaire financier Carter Darling, attorney Paul Ross has grown accustomed to all the luxuries of Park Avenue. But a tragic event is about to catapult the Darling family into the middle of a massive financial investigation and a red-hot scandal. Suddenly, Paul must decide where his loyalties really lie. Debut novelist Cristina Alger is a former analyst at Goldman Sachs, an attorney, and the daughter of a Wall Street financier. Drawing on her unique insider's perspective, Alger gives us an irresistible glimpse into the highest echelons of New York society—and a fast-paced thriller of epic proportions that powerfully echoes Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and reads like a fictional Too Big to Fail.

On a secluded stretch of Cape Cod, a wedding is being planned at a beloved beach house—only for a long kept secret to emerge that hurtles both the wedding and the family off course, in this fresh, lyrical new novel from the acclaimed author of the “charming and warmhearted” (PopSugar) The Summer House. At age ninety-two, Tish Darling is the matriarch and protector of what’s left of the Darling family fortune, including the decades-old beach house, Riptide. Located on the crook of Cape Cod, it’s a place she once loved but has not returned to in decades, since a tragic family accident one perfect summer day. Still, she is determined to keep Riptide in the family. Even if that means going back there on the cusp of her granddaughter’s wedding. Even if it means revealing someone else’s truth. Her daughter-in-law Cora has her own complicated feelings surrounding Tish’s return as well as doubts about her place within the Darling family. After all, Cora came into the family carrying a secret that her husband promised to keep for her forever. Tish’s sudden return to Riptide may force everything they’ve worked so hard to protect out into the light. Meanwhile, Cora’s eldest daughter, Andi isn’t exactly looking forward to her little sister’s wedding so soon after her own divorce. To make matters worse, her ex has arrived on the Cape with his insufferable new girlfriend. Andi has no idea how she’ll be able to survive this family reunion…until she bumps into an old friend from the past. A friend who may just offer her a second chance. As the three distinct generations of Darling women arrive at Riptide, they have no idea that this summer will forever change them. One old secret, kept with the best of intentions, threatens to not only divide the family, but shatter each member’s sense of who they really are. Can the ties that bind survive, when the history you’ve always been told turns out to be untrue?

The Beach of the Thousand Palms beckons with all its tropical splendour, but first the Darlings must sail past the Republic of Nananagua. A hot, smelly dictatorship, with a secret police force of nannies, surrounded by sharks. Sounds like a horrible place to run aground? But the Darlings, of course, are not daunted in the least.

Gregory Keays is a writer whose brilliant future is behind him. Corroded with envy, Gregory watches as his contemporaries produce better work and live happier lives while he teaches community college composition classes and compiles books about other books. One day, Gregory is convinced, the world will recognize his talents. In the meantime, his marriage to a new-age feng shui artist has become cold and distant, and his relationship with his reclusive teen-age son is in free-fall. But when a brilliant student enters his life, Gregory is offered one last, glorious chance to save his career. Soon, however, Gregory's Faustian pact with success unravels around him, and he must turn to darker, more duplicitous means to secure his fame. Set in the dangerous world where real life and literary ambition collide, Kill Your Darlings is an unforgettable novel of ego and delusion, villainy and the betrayal of love.

It happened quickly. Overnight, the greater Los Angeles area found itself in the horrifying grip of a werewolf epidemic. Twenty-eight days of the month, those who change are no different from those who have managed to stay uninfected—the normals, the High Bloods. But every full moon, they become the most ravenous creatures mankind has ever seen. A new law-enforcement agency keeps tabs on those whose blood runs Lycan. Rawson is a agent for Lycan Control, making sure all the afflicted are found, monitored, and kept locked up the night they change. But the Lycans in Hollywood have risen to cultlike proportions, and Rawson’s job is getting tougher. One night a woman changes right in front of Rawson. And it’s not a full moon. Someone deep in the bowels of Hollywood has managed to rewrite the rules of the werewolves’ existence. Battling a rising tide of Lycan-rights activists and a growing population of those who choose to become Lycan, Rawson must carve a path to the top of the Lycan food chain before all hell breaks loose.

An electrifying story of fear and sacrifice, and what people will do to outrun the shadows. Iraqi aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Australia, decades later, Gerry is in fear of his tyrannical father, Toohey, who has returned from the Iraq War bearing the physical and psychological scars of conflict. Meanwhile, Robbie is dealing with her own father’s dementia when the past enters the present. These characters’ worlds intertwine in a brilliant narrative of guilt and reckoning, trauma and survival. Crossing the frontiers of war, protest and reconciliation, Act of Grace is a meditation on inheritance: the damage that one generation passes on to the next, and the potential for transformation. ‘Act of Grace is bold, brilliant and breathtakingly humane. Anna Krien makes riveting the sweep of history and the lived price of war; at the same time she reveals, with great insight, the intimacies of daily love and tiny, splintering acts of violence in families. She is both wide-angle and close-up, and there is redemption in every line. Anna Krien is the real deal – a novelist for our times.’ —Anna Funder, author of All That I Am ‘Masterful – a far-reaching tapestry of a novel. Nuanced and whip-smart, this is a work of profound empathy – a book of and for our times. As Act of Grace unfolds with precise muscularity, Krien’s inhabitation of each character approaches the divine.’ —Peggy Frew, author of The Islands and Hope Farm ‘Act of Grace is a work of stunning virtuosity. Krien has taken a huge leap of creative faith, and from the very first page to the last I was ready to follow her anywhere.’ —Ceridwen Dovey, author of In the Garden of the Fugitives and Only the Animals ‘An ambitious and compelling study of trauma and how it’s transferred and inherited ... a nuanced consideration of the different forms and ethics of activism.’ —Books+Publishing