How to Be Unmothered is a lyrical memoir set in Trinidad, where Camille U. Adams traces a family history of women who abandon their daughters and the island’s colonial legacies of violence. Adams writes about a fraught relationship with a controlling mother, the danger and poverty of her neighborhood, and the small consolations of the natural world as she navigates survival. The book explores escape, self-determination, and what it means to rebuild a life when the maternal bond is broken.

So Many Stars collects intimate oral histories from twenty trans and gender-nonconforming elders of color, sharing their personal journeys of identity, community-building, creativity, and activism across decades. Drawn from extensive interviews, the book preserves their memories and wisdom, offering a collective portrait of resilience, cultural innovation, and intergenerational connection.

When Jennifer discovers the Korean idea of yeokmasal—an alleged, inheritable urge to roam—she confronts her mother’s decades of restless moves and her own sudden displacements after a personal breakdown. Traveling between Brooklyn, South Carolina, and Oklahoma, the memoir follows their drifting apart and reconnections as Choi explores identity, belonging, and what it means to leave or stay. It’s a personal, thoughtful look at family, home, and living with uncertainty.

An engrossing study that interweaves a biography of a singular Southern poet with close readings of his work, tracing how his rural roots, personal mythmaking, and turbulent inner life shaped a distinctive, visionary voice. The book reconstructs his life—family, travels, influences—and situates his major long poem and lyric sequences within themes of landscape, memory, violence, and longing, while examining stylistic innovations, narrative lyricism, and religious and folkloric echoes. It also addresses the circumstances and impact of his early death, the cultivation of his posthumous reputation, and the ways his work challenges and enriches American poetic traditions.

A lyrical, month-by-month chronicle of life among coastal seal colonies that blends close natural history observation, personal anecdote and evocative photography to trace the animals’ seasonal rhythms—from mating and pupping through molting and migration—while highlighting individual personalities, social bonds and the practical challenges of survival. The narrative pairs intimate encounters with broader conservation context, showing how changing habitats and human activity shape the seals’ lives over the course of a year.

This Unruly Witness gathers essays, poems, letters, and interviews that explore poet-activist June Jordan’s life, work, and influence. Contributors reflect on her roles as poet, healer, and organizer, showing how her writing continues to inspire community, love, and resistance.

A sharp, historically grounded critique of American policing that traces how beliefs about safety, property and race shaped the police’s expansion and distorted their role, arguing that contemporary reforms often entrench harm by treating symptoms rather than causes. Weaving legal and social history with reporting, the book shows how slavery-era patrols, labor control, and twentieth-century professionalization remade public order, and how police increasingly became the default responders to homelessness, mental illness and domestic crises. From this foundation it challenges familiar reformist fixes and advances a practical, justice-oriented case for shrinking police functions, redirecting resources to community institutions and reimagining public safety around prevention, care and democratic accountability.

Adam Plunkett combines close readings of Robert Frost’s poems with biographical investigation to reassess Frost’s life and key relationships—particularly his fraught friendship with biographer Lawrance Thompson. The book traces how Frost’s tensions between privacy and intimacy shaped his poetry, offering a fresh, concise interpretation without revealing plot details.

Between 1921 and 1944, roughly one million ethnic Mexicans living in the United States—many U.S. citizens, especially women and children—were forcibly removed to Mexico. Drawing on oral histories and archival research, Marla A. Ramírez traces the effects of these removals across three generations, focusing on women’s efforts to reclaim citizenship, the loss of generational wealth, and long-term legal, social, and economic consequences. The book highlights how policies on both sides of the border enabled the expulsions and how descendants continue to resist and remember this overlooked chapter of U.S. immigration history.

In the French Alps, a solitary mountain climber and gym teacher named Cédric brings home a Bernese Mountain Dog puppy called Ubac. The two form a close bond as they hike and explore the outdoors, and over the years their household grows to include Cédric’s partner and more dogs. Ubac and Me is a quiet, moving reflection on companionship, the rhythms of a life lived outdoors, and the deep affection people share with their pets.

Selby’s memoir recounts a decade working as a wildland firefighter, from novice crew member to elite hotshot teams. It blends firsthand accounts of the physical and emotional demands of frontline firefighting and the complicated camaraderie and sexism encountered on crews with broader reflections on fire science, federal policy, and land stewardship.

Taking Manhattan tells how, in 1664, English forces moved to take Dutch New Amsterdam and how negotiations between Richard Nicolls and Peter Stuyvesant reshaped the settlement. The book follows the fusion of Dutch multiethnic commercial life with rising English power that laid the foundations of modern New York, while also tracing the violent dispossession of Native peoples and the emergence of slavery—capturing the city’s early mix of opportunity and oppression.

A critical legal history that traces how judges, prosecutors, and other courtroom actors actively shaped and sustained racialized systems of punishment and disenfranchisement from the era of slavery through Jim Crow to the modern carceral state. The book argues that courts and legal doctrines were not neutral arbiters but complicit architects of policies—through rulings, sentencing practices, and procedural decisions—that expanded state power over Black communities. By combining historical narrative, case studies, and legal analysis, it reveals the judiciary’s central role in producing mass incarceration and calls for rethinking the role of legal institutions in achieving racial justice.

Lindsey Stewart traces the history of conjure women—healers, midwives, and spiritual practitioners—whose herbal remedies, rituals, and crafts shaped African American life from slavery through Jim Crow. Working in secrecy, they preserved ancestral knowledge and created practical responses to oppression, influencing everyday health remedies, music, textiles, and foodways. The book explores how these hidden practices helped communities survive and resist and how their legacy is woven into American culture.

Nicholas Thompson traces how running has shaped his life—from a childhood mile shared with his father, through a medical scare and the grief after his father’s death, to an intense period of later-life training for the Chicago Marathon. Over seven years he transforms his body and outlook, using the discipline of distance running to explore ambition, aging, family relationships, and resilience.

In 1975, as violence escalates in Northern Ireland, a threatening letter and bullet arrive in Philadelphia, linking the city’s Irish community to the conflict. The book chronicles a small group of U.S.-based Irish nationalists known as the Philadelphia Five who secretly smuggled weapons to the IRA, and follows the investigative and personal consequences that followed—without revealing outcomes or twists.

A brilliant, damaged hacker lies in hospital and faces psychiatric scrutiny and criminal charges while a covert network inside the security services moves to bury her past; her journalist ally pursues a dangerous investigation into corruption, cover-ups and long-buried abuses tied to her violent history, using reporting and digital sleuthing to expose powerful officials, protect her in court, and force a high-stakes legal and moral reckoning that reshapes the lives of everyone involved.

When Satnam returns to his ancestral village for his grandmother’s funeral, he finds water in a long-dry well — a discovery that sparks plans to unearth the legendary Saraswati and build a new city. As Satnam becomes drawn into the project and its rising nationalist fervor, the river’s reappearance connects him to six relatives around the world and prompts reckonings with history, land, family and identity.

Tara, a successful Delhi lawyer, and her friend Lila face family conflicts when their fathers’ decisions and brothers’ claims put their independence at risk. The novel follows their struggles with sibling rivalry, patriarchal expectations and contested inheritances against a backdrop of ecological strain and political unrest in contemporary Delhi.

Jules works behind the bar at a rundown student nightclub in Brighton, where she watches life pass by while her ex-husband runs the place. When a new, enigmatic young coworker arrives, their developing connection unsettles Jules and pushes her to rethink love, desire, and what family can become. Gunk is an intimate, atmospheric novel about unexpected bonds and the uncertain shape of the future.

A middle-aged woman and her teenage sister take a whisky-fuelled campervan road trip across Scotland to celebrate a birthday. As they travel, old tensions, secrets and complicated relationships resurface. Sharp, funny and emotionally honest, the novel explores sisterhood, friendship and the lingering pull of youth—without giving away key plot points.

In the late 18th century, Angel Kelly sails from Liverpool intending to found a utopian commune but a mutiny leaves him and his crew stranded on the coast of a Spanish colony. Rescued by a young Amerindian named Esa, the group's actions soon threaten her community, and years later Esa is drawn into a dangerous struggle between local resistance and competing colonial powers.

Three very different mothers — glamorous Frankie, recently bereaved Miriam, and charity CEO Bronagh — find their lives entangled when their 18-year-old sons are accused of sexually assaulting Misty Johnston, a young woman from a less privileged family. As they use their influence to shield their children, the novel examines class, power and the moral complexities of parenthood in contemporary Northern Ireland.

Set over a year in a remote village in northern England, Open, Heaven follows sixteen-year-old James as he discovers his sexuality and meets Luke, an older, charismatic and troubled boy sent to live with relatives. Their growing connection challenges James’s ties to family and community and reveals both boys’ deep longings for intimacy, belonging, and stability. The novel is a spare, lyrical exploration of first love, desire, and the risks of becoming who you are.