www.passions.com

THE SYNDICATE SPY

Set in a near future when the planet’s oil reserves are essentially gone—and former oil-rich nations are desperate to regain their power on the world stage—the story revolves around Juliet Arroway. She’s an operative for the Syndicate, a partnership of intelligence agencies whose mission is to hunt down and eradicate energy terrorists. Arroway’s main goal is to stop the mysterious Abu Hassan, the head of a terrorist group that has been responsible for the deaths of countless people over the yea

STRANGE SALLY DIAMOND

Sally’s father, a psychiatrist, diagnosed her as “socially deficient,” so although she’s 42, she’s always lived with him outside the small Irish village of Carricksheedy. He'd always said that she should “put [him] out with the trash” when he dies, so when it happens, she tries to burn his body in their incinerator. In the flurry of public attention that follows, ranging from concern about Sally’s ability to function on her own to outraged theories that she must have murdered her father and was

THE PAINTER'S DAUGHTERS

As promised by the title, Howes delivers an immersive dive into the lives of Gainsborough’s daughters but also provides an intriguing backstory about his wife’s purported ancestry. The Gainsborough girls—Molly the elder and Peggy a bit younger—enjoy a fairly feral and unrestrained early childhood in Suffolk, despite their mother’s attempts to rein them in. Molly shows signs of a troubling tendency toward spells of odd behavior and confusion, which continue, and worsen, after the family relocate

FLAGS ON THE BAYOU

Seriously in debt to business associate Minos Suarez, Charles Lufkin rents him Hannah Laveau, an enslaved woman he’s recently purchased. Things don’t go well for either Hannah, whom Suarez unmercifully assaults, or Suarez, who’s found castrated with his throat cut shortly after Hannah parts company with him. Just as Hannah is haunted by Samuel, the son from whom she was separated during the bloody Union attack on Shiloh Church, Lufkin’s nephew, Wade, who volunteered as a medical officer on the

MADNESS

NBC News reporter Hylton documents the history of Crownsville Hospital in Maryland, founded in 1911 as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. Getting to the story was not easy: The archives were incomplete because “the state had destroyed or lost most of the files preceding the year 1960, and others they had allowed to become contaminated with asbestos.” Unsurprisingly, the more controversial the past episode, such as the murder of a patient or systematic abuse, the likelier the documents were to h

BURN THE NEGATIVE

The last time Laura Warren was in Los Angeles, she was a young kid going by another name and reluctantly starring in a slasher flick called The Guesthouse. The intervening years saw eight of the movie's cast and crew members come to terrible ends. Now living in London, she's been strong-armed by her editor into flying west to write about a new miniseries based on the original film. Why is he so adamant about making her write a puff piece anyone could do? Anyway, Laura is determined to stay in L

THE WHITE BONUS

Award-winning journalist McMillan, author of The American Way of Eating, combines investigative reporting and memoir in a penetrating look at the material advantages of racial privilege. “For a very long time,” she writes, “I thought race and racism ‘happened’ only to people who were not white.” Using her own family as one example, and profiling four others, she investigates the impact of whiteness on individuals of different generations, from different parts of the country, who have one thing

DIVISIBLE MAN

In this 10th installment in his contemporary adventure series, the author continues the exploits of Will Stewart, an air charter pilot, and his wife, Andy, a detective in Wisconsin’s Essex County Police Department (characterized by her husband as “an equal opportunity juggernaut of justice”). Will and Andy are briefed by FBI Special Agent Leslie Carson-Pelham and her colleagues on the inner workings of a paramilitary insurgency group known as Company W (“The W stands for White and the military

LOUD

Afualo never intended to become famous on TikTok. Her goal had been to become a football reporter because football was home to many members of her Samoan community. Then, dismissal from her dream job, followed in quick succession by the Covid-19 pandemic, changed her plans. “The reality of it going down the drain so quickly and aggressively crushed my spirit in ways I had never anticipated,” she writes. The author joined TikTok and posted humorous tirades against “awful men who attack marginali

WOODROW WILSON

Historian, lawyer, and former Congressman Cox writes that Wilson was the first Southern Democrat to occupy the White House since Andrew Johnson. Scholars have long considered him a giant among presidents for his progressive reforms and leadership in World War I. They have not ignored his flaws, emphasizing the censorship, suppression of civil rights, and persecution of war opponents. Cox will have none of that. Sticking to the historical record but keeping Wilson’s achievements in the backgroun

BOOK OF SCREAMS

Tanya is beyond excited to meet Joel Southland. His scary stories are so relatable, and she treasures the signed bookmark he gives her when he visits her school…until late one night, when the ink from the signature appears to come to life. When a new Southland story feels entirely too familiar, Tanya begins to piece together the clues about where he’s getting his ideas, and she patiently develops a plan to turn the tables. Interwoven with Tanya’s journey to stop Southland are many of the short

MELVILL

“Call me Herman.” Such a commandment could come from only one writer, Herman Melville, who stands at the center of Fresán’s narrative. Occupying much of that space, too, albeit in sometimes spectral form, is Melville’s father, Allan Melvill (the -e a typo that his son, the victim of a bureaucrat’s pen, stuck with, even as, later in the novel, he notes ruefully that his obituary in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, where several of his stories appeared, will render his name as Henry). Allan, born to a

PETUNIA THE PERFECTIONIST

Petunia is a little girl who believes that everything has its proper place and that anything done less than perfectly is unacceptable. (“If there was one thing Petunia knew, it was the importance of being PERFECT.”) Petunia has never heard of a “perfectionist,” but when she overhears her classmate call her one, she looks up the word in the dictionary and proudly shares her new nickname with her mother at home. Petunia isn’t convinced when her mother tells her that there are benefits to making m

THE YELLOW BUS

Deftly invoking the anthropomorphized objects in books of old (as in the works of Virginia Lee Burton), Long introduces readers to a small town and the yellow bus that serves it. Using charcoal and graphite, the author/artist portrays a mostly black-and-white world; he relies on colorful acrylics to depict those who enter the bus (who's described with female pronouns), including children ferried to school. Time goes on, and the bus is repurposed to take the elderly around town. Later, she’s aba

THE NIGERWIFE

Nicole Oruwari has lived in Lagos, Nigeria, for seven years, but she’s never really felt quite at home. The Black British woman moved to the city with her husband, Tonye, where they planned to raise their two sons in the palatial home of Tonye’s family. Nicole is a member of the Nigerwives, a group of foreign women in the city married to Nigerian men, and most of her social life revolves around the organization’s parties, seminars, and fundraisers. When one of her friends from the group suddenl

THE COLLECTED REGRETS OF CLOVER

When she was 5, Clover witnessed her kindergarten teacher’s collapse, and then, when she was 6, her parents died in an accident while on vacation in China. Taken in by her maternal grandfather, she moved from Connecticut to New York City, where he raised her lovingly, if in some isolation. Now 36, she still lives in her grandfather’s West Village apartment, though he’s been dead for 13 years; works as a death doula; and counts as her only true friends her pets and her 87-year-old neighbor. Her

AN AMERICAN BEAUTY

Arabella Yarrington is helping to support her family in post–Civil War Richmond when Collis Potter Huntington, an industrialist and railroad tycoon, happens to visit the gambling saloon where she serves champagne to patrons. Immediately attracted to the woman 30 years his junior, Collis begins visiting the boardinghouse Belle’s mother owns. Quick to spot an opportunity to help her family escape the grinding struggle to make ends meet, Belle sets about using Collis’ affection to secure financial

THE HUNTER

In fictional Ardnakelty, on Ireland’s west coast, lives retired American cop Cal Hooper, who busies himself repairing furniture with 15-year-old Theresa “Trey” Reddy and fervently wishes to be boring. Then into town pops Trey’s long-gone, good-for-nothing dad, Johnny, all smiles and charm. Much to her distaste, he says he wants to reclaim his fatherly role. In fact, he’s on the run from a criminal for a debt he can’t repay, and he has a cockamamie scheme to persuade local townsfolk that there m

THE NOTEBOOK

British publisher and diarist Allen brings his love of notebooks to a lively, wide-ranging history of bound blank pages. Notebooks, he writes, “interest me as a technology that has had tangible effects on the world around us.” The author started keeping a journal in 2002: “Writing a diary made me happier; keeping things-to-do lists made me more reliable (which in turn made those around me happier), and I learned never to go to a doctor’s appointment, or a meeting of any kind, without taking not

LOOT

Abbas, the hero of James’ lively and symbolically rich third novel, is a poor 17-year-old artisan in Mysore in 1794 when he’s recruited by Tipu Sultan, the local ruler, to apprentice with Lucien Du Leze, a French clockmaker. Together they are charged with making an automaton of a tiger attacking a British soldier. The experience hones his carving skills, but just as importantly it introduces him to an intercontinental power play: Tipu, aka the Tiger of Mysore, is attempting to fend off an incur