Soul Connection

Whether hot off the presses or on the shelves for years, a good book is worth talking about.

- AMY JONES

Frontlist

Room on the Sea: Three Novellas by André Aciman

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Novellas, June 2025)

SYNOPSIS: In the first of three novellas, The Gentleman From Peru begins with a group of eight friends—Mark, Basil, Emma, Claire, Angelica, Paul, Margot, and Oscar—having dinner at a hotel restaurant on the Amalfi Coast when a strange man walks up and puts his hand on Mark's shoulder, almost immediately relieving the pain Mark has felt since a sporting injury. The group becomes even more confused and disconcerted when the stranger starts revealing information about each of them that he should have no way of knowing. Over the course of a few days, the stranger strikes up a particular friendship with Margot, the most reticent of the bunch, until it becomes clear, this was no chance encounter.

In Room on the Sea, two strangers meet while waiting for jury duty and after, what is at first, a strained conversation about the book the woman is reading (Wuthering Heights), they start to connect and have lunch together at a nearby Chinese restaurant (neither of their spouses like Chinese food). From there, a surprising relationship develops over the course of the week.

Finally, Mariana is a contemporary take on a centuries-old story of a nun seduced and discarded by a well-known man-about-town as she works through her heartbreak and sense of betrayal.