A serial killer draws the Victorian courtesan and professional sleuth into 19th century London’s criminal underground in this historical mystery. London, 1863. Women in Waterloo are turning up dead, their sexual organs removed and mutilated. When a girl goes missing and the search proves fruitless, fears grow that the killer may have claimed another victim. With the police at a total loss, it falls to courtesan and professional detective, Heloise Chancey, to investigate. With the assistance of her friend and maid, Amah Li Leen, Heloise inches closer to the truth. But when Amah is implicated in the brutal plot, Heloise begins to question who she can trust. In times like these, even a woman acquainted with London’s dark side must be wary of what lurks in the shadows.

Think adolescence is hell? You have no idea... Welcome to Dante's Inferno, by way of The Breakfast Club, from the mind of American fiction's most brilliant troublemaker. "Death, like life, is what you make out of it." So says Madison, the whip-tongued 11-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's subversive homage to the young adult genre. Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off touting their new film projects and adopting more orphans. Over the holidays she dies of a marijuana overdose--and the next thing she knows, she's in Hell. This is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno inspired by both the most extreme and mundane of human evils, where The English Patient plays on repeat and roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb. However, underneath Madison's sad teenager affect there is still a child struggling to accept not only the events of her dysfunctional life, but also the truth about her death. For Madison, though, a more immediate source of comfort lies in the motley crew of young sinners she meets during her first days in Hell. With the help of Archer, Babette, Leonard, and Patterson, she learns to navigate Hell--and discovers that she'd rather be mortal and deluded and stupid with those she loves than perfect and alone.

" . . . a gripping read that reminds us why the preternatural is a dramatic field for our enjoyment and (dare we say it!) moral growth."-- Eleanor Nicholson, Editor, Ignatius Critical Editions: Dracula When a sixteen-year-old orphan vampire adopted by an order of nuns matures into her immortal, blood-sucking glory, all hell literally breaks loose. Yet with every rapturous taste of blood, Jennifer Carshaw cannot help but long for something even more exquisite: the capacity to experience true love. As she struggles to balance her murderous secret life with homework, cross-country practice, and her first boyfriend, Jennifer delves into the terrifying questions surrounding her inhuman existence, driven by the unexpectedly human need to understand why she is doomed to alife she never chose. Bridging the gap between the literary tradition of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the modern teen vampire romance made popular by the Twilight series, Jennifer the Damned reexamines the legendary monster as a conflicted and complex being. Jennifer is at once the quintessential vampire, embodying an unholy union of life and death; yet she is also asympathetic young woman full of spiritual anxieties, gifted with a limitless sense of ironic humor, and possessed of a beautifully persistenthope in the love she yearns for.

Instant New York Times and Indie Bestseller! New York Times bestselling author Renée Ahdieh returns with a sumptuous, sultry and romantic new series set in 19th century New Orleans where vampires hide in plain sight. In 1872, New Orleans is a city ruled by the dead. But to seventeen-year-old Celine Rousseau, New Orleans is a safe haven after she's forced to flee her life as a dressmaker in Paris. Taken in by the sisters of the Ursuline convent in the middle of the carnival season, Celine is quickly enraptured by the vibrant city, from its music to its fancy soirées and even its danger. She becomes embroiled in the city's glitzy underworld, known as La Cour des Lions, after catching the eye of the group's enigmatic leader, Sébastien Saint Germain. When the body of one of the girls from the convent is found in Sébastien's own lair--the second dead girl to turn up in recent weeks--Celine battles her attraction to Sébastien and suspicions about his guilt along with the shame of her own horrible secret. After a third murder, New Orleans becomes gripped by the terror of a serial killer on the loose--one who has now set Celine in his sights. As the murderer stalks her, Celine finally takes matters into her own hands, only to find herself caught in the midst of an age-old feud between the darkest creatures of the night, where the price of forbidden love is her life. At once a sultry romance and a decadent, thrilling mystery, master storyteller Renée Ahdieh embarks on her most potent fantasy series yet.

The debut novel from Akashic’s new imprint, Punk Planet Books. Also check out the smash hits How the Hula Girl Sings, Tender as Hellfire, and The Boy Detective Fails. “A funny, hard-rocking first-person tale of teenage angst and discovery.” —Booklist “Captures the loose, fun, recklessness of midwestern punk.” —MTV.com Hairstyles of the Damned is an honest, true-life depiction of growing up punk on Chicago’s south side: a study in the demons of racial intolerance, Catholic school conformism, and class repression. It is the story of the riotous exploits of Brian, a high school burnout, and his best friend, Gretchen, a punk rock girl fond of brawling. Based on the actual events surrounding a Chicago high school’s segregated prom, this work of fiction unflinchingly pursues the truth in discovering what it means to be your own person.

Winner of the 2017 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize Sparked by the description of a ‘Malay trollope’ in W. Somerset Maugham’s story, ‘The Four Dutchmen’, Mirandi Riwoe’s novella, The Fish Girl, tells of an Indonesian girl whose life is changed irrevocably when she moves from a small fishing village to work in the house of a Dutch merchant. There she finds both hardship and tenderness as her traditional past and colonial present collide. Told with an exquisitely restrained voice and coloured with lush description, this moving book will stay with you long after the last page.

OPTIONED FOR FILM BY LEGENDARY PICTURES (Interstellar, the Dark Knight films, Godzilla) “The Damned underlines Pyper’s growing reputation as one of the most talented successors to the inimitable Stephen King.” —Daily Mail (UK) Most people who have a near-death experience come back alone...but not Danny Orchard. After he survived a fire that claimed the life of his evil twin sister, Ashleigh, Danny wrote a bestselling memoir about going to heaven and back. But despite the resulting fame and fortune, he’s never been able to enjoy his second chance at life: Ash won’t let him. She’s haunted Danny for twenty years and now, just when he’s met the love of his life and has a chance at real happiness, she wants more than ever to punish him for being alive—so she sets her sights on Danny’s new wife and stepson. To save them from her wrath, he’ll have to meet his sister where she now resides—and hope that this time he can keep her there forever.

In 1891, when coal companies in eastern Tennessee brought in cheap convict labor to take over their jobs, workers responded by storming the stockades, freeing the prisoners, and loading them onto freight trains. Over the next year, tactics escalated to include burning company property and looting company stores. This was one of the largest insurrections in US working-class history. It happened at the same time as the widely publicized northern labor war in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And it was largely ignored, then and now. Dixie Be Damned engages seven similarly "hidden" insurrectionary episodes in Southern history to demonstrate the region's long arc of revolt. Countering images of the South as pacified and conservative, this adventurous retelling presents history in the rough. Not the image of the South many expect, this is the South of maroon rebellion, wildcat strikes, and Robert F. Williams's book Negroes with Guns, a South where the dispossessed refuse to quietly suffer their fate. This is people's history at its best: slave revolts, multiracial banditry, labor battles, prison uprisings, urban riots, and more. Neal Shirley grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and now lives in Durham, NC, where he is involved in several anti-prison initiatives and runs a small publishing project called the North Carolina Piece Corps. Saralee Stafford was born in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Her recent political work has focused on connecting the struggles of street organizations with those of anarchists in the area. She teaches gender-related health in Durham, North Carolina.

”What a treat! A cracking historical mystery featuring not one, but two tough, resourceful, brave and interesting female leads... A Necessary Murder is smart, raunchy and thrillingly subversive.” – Emily Maguire Stoke Newington, 1863: Little Margaret Lovejoy is found brutally murdered in the outhouse of her family’s estate. A few days later, another victim is found on the doorstep of Eurasian courtesan and professional detective Heloise Chancey at her prestigious address. At the same time, Heloise’s mother, Amah Li Leen, must confront events from her past that threaten her present. In a maelstrom of murder and deceit, Heloise is caught up in a crime that reaches into the very heart of her existence. Fans of Phryne Fisher and Downtown Abbey will love the flamboyant heroines, mouthy servants and bloody murders in the Heloise Chancey Mystery series. “It’s a pleasure to watch Tjia’s unusual sleuth get mad and get even in a grisly tale with a surprising climax; readers will eagerly await the sequel.” – Kirkus Review “Heloise Chancey is a marvellous character, a gutsy, flamboyant self-made woman and expert guide to the nether regions of Victorian London.” – Marele Day Heloise Chancey may be a fictional character living her life in London in the mid 1800s, but she is very much a woman for our times. M.J. Tjia combines this endearing character with the page-turning thrills of a good whodunnit, the rollicking Victorian English read intricately woven with all the colour and flavour of the East.” – Cass Moriarty, Parting Words “Heloise Chancey is a witty, sexy, resourceful sleuth who refuses to be constrained by the Victorian sensibilities of the time, choosing instead to subvert them across lines of gender and culture. Every quest Heloise sets out upon and every clue she reveals along the way is underpinned by an author determined to apply the same forensic detail to historical accuracy as her protagonist is to solving crimes. M.J. Tjia is masterful at bringing the sights and smells of Victorian London vividly to life in this fast-paced, thrilling and absorbing whodunnit, where nothing and no one is ever as you think.” – Sally Piper, Grace’s Table

In this follow-up to his tremendously successful first novel, This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald again recaptures the Jazz Age's darker side as well as its excitement and joie de vivre. The Beautiful and Damned traces the meteoric path of two glittering young socialites. Building their marriage on the shaky foundation of an expected inheritance, they devote themselves to hedonistic pursuits that lead to moral and financial bankruptcy. The characters' self-indulgence and mutual destruction anticipated the tragic lives of Scott and his flapper wife, Zelda. The Fitzgeralds regarded the world as a stage and their lives as performances, and their glamorous doings became as well-known as any of Scott's books. In an eerie foreshadowing of the real-life couple's rapid descent into ruin, this lyric, compulsively readable narrative examines the perishable nature of dreams in the face of reality—a theme scrutinized with profound effect in the book's esteemed successor, The Great Gatsby.