Full AspenCat Catalog

Summer in London stops for no-one. Not the half-naked boozers, stoners, and cruisers, the hen parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried fags. It's June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city's parks, beer gardens and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive. Everyone but Maggie. She's 30, pregnant and broke. Faced with moving back to the town she fought to escape, she's wondering if having...

Populated by unforgettable, complex characters, a novel about three generations of strong-willed women shaped by the secrets buried in their family’s past is a portrait of family, marriage, ambition, power, the stories we inherit and the lies we tell to become the people we believe we’re meant to be.

On the island off the coast of Washington where Sam and Elena were raised, they watch their mother struggle and dream of another life. They both work for the vacationers and rich people on the island, but can't get enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits shaping their existence. One night, Sam spots a bear swimming in the dark waters of the channel, and when the bear turns up by their home, she is terrified and more convinced...

"As an undergraduate, Melina Green had a rare opportunity to have one of her first plays judged by famous theater critic Jasper Tolle, only to be publicly humiliated by a harsh and biased critique. Ten years later, her confidence as a playwright has never recovered, although she has just completed a work that she thinks is her best yet. It is based on the life of her ancestor Emilia Bassano, the first published female poet in England--and rumored...

"With her "extraordinary capacity for radical empathy" (The Boston Globe), remarkable insight into the human condition, and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst; fall in love and yet choose to be apart; and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it: What does anyone's life mean? It's autumn in Maine, and...

"Following the death of her former husband, Cam, fifty-four-year-old Eleanor has moved back to the New Hampshire farm where they raised three children to care for their brain-injured son, Toby, now an adult. Toby’s older brother, Al, is married and living in Seattle with his wife; their sister, Ursula, lives in Vermont with her husband and two children. Although all appears stable, old resentments, anger, and bitterness simmer just beneath the surface."...

Recently widowed Marin Henderson considers time with her two adult children a gift. And she's intent on not prying into their lives while they're all together, cleaning out her late parents' Colorado home. But from the start, nothing goes as planned. Her free-spirited daughter, Slade, and her strait-laced son, Reed, both arrive ahead of schedule, and no one is explaining why. Marin knows they're hiding issues in their personal lives. But she can only...

"A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday's Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces--death, violence, estrangement--come...

Iona and Audrey emit smoke signals when they need help, but sometimes it takes more than water to put them out. Iona thought she would sip mimosas while relaxing on a beach in retirement, but instead she suffers from loneliness as vacation brochures collect dust. Even worse, she feels forgotten by her daughter. Iona’s daughter, Audrey, serially dates emotionally scarred men and buries herself in work to avoid the pain of rejection. Audrey feels...

"In this charming and emotionally resonant follow up to the internationally bestselling Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi Yagisawa paints a poignant and thoughtful portrait of life, love, and how much books and bookstores mean to the people who love them. Set again in the beloved Japanese bookshop and nearby coffee shop in the Jimbochi neighborhood of Toyko, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop deepens the relationship between Takako, her uncle...