"Felicity Jin grew up literally hanging onto Mom's apron strings in their magical bakery in the quaint town of Pixie, California. Her mother's enchanted baked goods, including puffy pineapple buns and creamy egg tarts, bring instant joy to all who consume them. Felicity has always been hesitant in the kitchen herself after many failed attempts, but a takeout meal gone wrong inspires her to craft some handmade fortune cookies. They become so popular...

In an isolated lighthouse on the California coast, Rowan Winterbourne lives a solitary life with only her secrets for company. For she has a mission that drives her--to avenge herself against Gregory Torval, the powerful drug and arms dealer who murdered her mother and vowed to eliminate everyone in her family. Then Joe Grantham arrives at her door and, for the first time, Rowan lets her guard down--a dangerous mistake when he blackmails her to go...

"An angry mother turns into a literal monster. A company in San Francisco can scrub your entire reputation and create a new one...for a price. A failed actor on a reality show turns into an unlikely world savior. And much more. Through each of these twelve interconnected stories, Katie Flynn masterfully blends people, places, and even realities. From a powerful and "radiant" (Kassandra Montag, author of After the Flood) new literary voice to be reckoned...

"Jana Rubio and her best friend, Maddy Parsons, have an epic senior year finale queued up: catching their favorite band at the Orchards, an outdoor music festival a two-hour drive away. When a blow-up over Maddy's time-sucking boyfriend exposes a rift that may have already been growing between them, Jana calls off their joint trip and gets a lift to the festival from her church friend Nathan . . . only to realize Maddy and her boyfriend are along...

"Amelia Bae-Wood's life is falling apart. Unemployed, newly single and completely broke -- for reasons she hasn't told anyone yet -- she finds herself hitchhiking across California to deal with the fallout of her mother's eviction from the family estate. Amelia needs somewhere to live and time to figure out what to do with the rest of her life, so moving with her mother and sister to Arcadia, the cancer retreat center where her sister volunteers,...

"A warrant service in the San Bernardino Mountains goes horribly wrong when an IED blast kills four police officers. Devastated by the loss of her team, the lone survivor, Long Beach sergeant Jodie King, struggles with her guilt and grief, especially as the case remains open with no clear leads or suspects. Weeks after the explosion, Jodie retires from the police department and returns to the mountain bomb site seeking peace and resolution . . . only...

Told in alternating voices, determined to make a difference and heal from their troubled pasts, teens Ana and Leandro fight to protect California wildlife and the endangered puma.

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly...

"Midway through her career, Ursula K. Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song, Always Coming Home is this legendary writer's fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. Having survived ecological catastrophe brought on by relentless industrialization,...