Red Dog Farm

Best friends Miranda Montana, Germaine St. Germaine-Chang, and Sicily Bell were the darlings of Hollywood who rose from teen success to in-demand idols of screaming fans and paparazzi. They rode the momentum like there was no tomorrow. But nothing lasts forever. Now Miranda, the wild-child movie star, drifts from rehab to dead-end relationships as she tries for a comeback from a very public fall from grace. Germaine, the daughter of billionaire hotel moguls, has lost her purpose. And then there’s Sicily, the all-American pop star who had a record deal, sold-out concerts, and controlling parents who squeezed the very life out of her. After a decade, fate reconnects these three young women for a long-awaited confrontation with the secrets, betrayals, heartbreak, and family traumas of the past. Settling old scores is just the beginning. It’s also time to repair the damage done and to hold fast to the most galvanizing success of their their friendship

Bullies, harsh teachers, vicious dogs–the pastoral British countryside is a much tougher place than ten-year-old city boy Peter thought it would be. Weirder, too–there are odd shopkeepers in the village, strange hermits living in the woods, and a man known as Scarecrow Man, who stands silently in the fields along Everlasting Lane looking up at the sky. Peter’s grieving mother has gone strange, too. In the new cottage where, after the death of his father, she’s moved them both from London, she seals off an upstairs room and forbids Peter from ever entering it. Somehow, he senses the locked room represents something that troubles his mother even worse than the death of his father–but what? It isn’t until he befriends the other school outcasts–the too-smart-for-her-own-good tomboy, Anna-Marie, and overweight Tommie–that Peter begins to think he has a fighting chance of getting by in school. And as the trio of outsiders band together, he begins to think he has a chance of helping his mother, too–by getting his new friends to help him discover the dark secret she is keeping from him…

The warm, funny, and supremely original new novel from one of the most acclaimed writers in America The year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his first day of high school—when Benji reveals his deep enthusiasm for the horror movie magazine Fangoria—his social doom is sealed for the next four years. But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own. Because their parents come out only on weekends, he and his friends are left to their own devices for three glorious months. And although he’s just as confused about this all-black refuge as he is about the white world he negotiates the rest of the year, he thinks that maybe this summer things will be different. If all goes according to plan, that is. There will be trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through, and state-of-the-art profanity to master. He will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut (which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy of ’85, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, with a little luck, things will turn out differently this summer. In this deeply affectionate and fiercely funny coming-of-age novel, Whitehead—using the perpetual mortification of teenage existence and the desperate quest for reinvention—lithely probes the elusive nature of identity, both personal and communal.