Description
Books include:
September title: THE ENDED WORLD, by Libbie Grant
A Sentient AI Connects an Ex-Nun, an Atheist Programmer, and a Medieval Saint on a Fateful Road Trip
A young woman’s vision over a Quebec lake sends her on a search to understand her relationship to the divine. While she spends years as a cloistered nun, a young boy struggles with his Mormon upbringing and, discovering the internet, grows up to design an AI entity that stuns him by appearing sentient. Embarking on their own separate road trips, these characters unite to face the scope of their responsibilities, their understanding of what’s holy, and the very question of what it is to be a human being. Steeped in philosophy, theology, and technology, THE ENDED WORLD is a novel for our times.
Libbie Grant is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. Under her pen name, Olivia Hawker, she writes historical fiction, for which she has appeared on the Washington Post bestseller list and has been a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, the Willa Literary Award, and the Audie Award for outstanding audiobooks. Recently she has begun to publish more experimental literary fiction under her real name.
October title: ALICE SEES GHOSTS, by Daisy Rockwell
Alice Bloodshaw’s grandmother lies dying in their crumbling ancestral home. Family relationships are fraught, and worsened by the mercurial behavior of Alice’s mother. Then Alice, eccentric and attuned to the supernatural, is haunted by the specter of her grandfather. His cryptic message sends Alice and her Bengali psychiatrist fiancé, practical-minded Ronit, on a journey from New England to India and back again to unearth the long-buried truths that have choked and tormented the family. Only by untangling the past and confronting the effects of aristocracy, secrecy, and colonialism can Alice begin to mend family ties and stop living as a ghost herself to build a new, solid future.
Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. Her work has been awarded the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and many other prizes. Her translations have been honored with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and PEN Translates. Her memoir Our Friend, Art is forthcoming from Pushkin Press in 2027.
November title: I’LL LOOK MYSELF IN THE EYES, by Rim Battal, translated from French by Liza Tripp
In this autobiographical novel, 17-year-old Rim is caught smoking out her window one Saturday morning in her home in Marrakesh, Morocco. This minor transgression unleashes a disproportionate response from her mother, who flies into a rage and beats her. Rim flees to her aunt’s house, where she soon learns her mother will only allow her to return if she completes a gynecological test certifying her virginity. So begins an incredibly nuanced journey into the tangled web of a patriarchal society in which various generations of women seem to complicitly preserve the status quo. Ultimately, it is Rim who breaks the cycle of dysfunction, rebels against tradition, confronts betrayal from the women closest to her (who were supposed to protect her), and dares to be her true self.
Rim Battal is a French-Moroccan poet living in Paris. After studying journalism, she has devoted herself to writing, photography and performing arts, becoming one of the figures of a new generation of poets. The French edition of I’LL LOOK MYSELF IN THE EYES won the coveted 2025 prix de la littérature arabe des lycéens and was a finalist for the main Arab literature prize in France.
