"Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover. Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios,...

"Samuel has lived alone on a small island off the coast of an unnamed African country for more than two decades. He tends to his garden, his lighthouse, and his chickens, content with a solitary life. Routinely, the nameless bodies of refugees wash ashore, but Samuel--who understands that the government only values certain lives, certain deaths--always buries them himself. One day, though, he finds that one of these bodies is still breathing. As he...

"Beatrice Carraway has dreams. Although she's aged out of the childhood pageant circuit, she's intent on carrying her talents all the way to the big screen--if only she can escape the poverty of West Dallas first. But as the Great Depression drags the working class further and further under, Beatrice struggles just to keep herself, her mother, and her younger sister afloat. After a string of failed auditions, she feels defeated.And then in walks Jack...

This previously unpublished novel from cult icon Katherine Dunn, the author of Geek Love, follows Sally Gunnar, a reclusive woman whose only companions are goldfish, a garden toad and a door-to-door salesman, as she broods over her deepest regrets: failed romances, body issues and her wayward early twenties.

Haunted by a decision he made as a young soldier in World War I, involving a French artist and her baby, Nick Burns, with only months left to live, enlists Jenny, a college dropout, to help him unravel the mystery, forcing them both to reckon with regret, betrayal and the lives they've left behind.