The World Cannot Give

The World Cannot Give

Tara Isabella Burton

Tara Isabella Burton

The Girls meets Fight Club in this coming-of-age novel about queer desire, religious zealotry, and the hunger for transcendence among the devoted members of a cultic chapel choir in a prestigious Maine boarding school—and the obsessively ambitious, terrifyingly charismatic girl that rules over them.When shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan's Academy in Maine, she dreams that life there will echo her favorite novel, All Before Them, the sole surviving piece of writing by Byronic "prep school prophet" (and St. Dunstan's alum) Sebastian Webster, who died at nineteen, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She soon finds the intensity she is looking for among the insular, Webster-worshipping members of the school's chapel choir, which is presided over by the charismatic, neurotic, overachiever Virginia Strauss. Virginia is as fanatical about her newfound Christian faith as she is about the miles she runs every morning before...
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Here in Avalon

Here in Avalon

Tara Isabella Burton

Tara Isabella Burton

An "enchanting" (Caroline Kepnes, author of You) New York City fairy tale about two sisters that fall under the spell of an underworld cabaret troupe that might be a dangerous cult—but one that makes the materialist world left in its wake feel like a sinister cult itself.Rose has come a long way. Raised—and often neglected—by a wayward mother in New York City's chaotic bohemia, Rose has finally built the life she's always wanted: a good job at a self-help startup, a clean apartment, an engagement to a stable if self-satisfied tech CEO who shares her faith in human potential, hard work, and the sacrifice of childish dreams. Rose's sister Cecilia, on the other hand, never grew up. Irresponsible and impetuous, prone to jetting off to a European monastery one month and a falcon rescue the next, Cecilia has spent her life in pursuit of fairy-tale narratives of transcendence and true love—grand ideas Rose knows never work out in the real...
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The Destroyer

The Destroyer

Tara Isabella Burton

Tara Isabella Burton

In a futuristic, fascistic Rome, a brilliant, unstable scientist proves that she can transcend the human body's limitations. The test subject? Her own daughter. A mother-daughter mad scientist story, THE DESTROYER asks how far we'll go to secure our own legacies — and how far we'll run to escape them.
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Social Creature

Social Creature

Tara Isabella Burton

Tara Isabella Burton

"Social Creature is a wicked original with echoes of the greats (Patricia Highsmith, Gillian Flynn)." — Janet Maslin, The New York TimesFor readers of Gillian Flynn and Donna Tartt, a dark, propulsive and addictive debut thriller, splashed with all the glitz and glitter of New York City.They go through both bottles of champagne right there on the High Line, with nothing but the stars over them... They drink and Lavinia tells Louise about all the places they will go together, when they finish their stories, when they are both great writers-to Paris and to Rome and to Trieste...Lavinia will never go. She is going to die soon. Louise has nothing. Lavinia has everything. After a chance encounter, the two spiral into an intimate, intense, and possibly toxic friendship. A Talented Mr. Ripley for the digital age, this seductive story takes a classic tale of obsession and makes it irresistibly new.
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