Adult

It’s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late '60s, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she’s 20, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things. Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road. Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

Today, democracy is the world’s only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In CAN DEMOCRACY WORK? James Miller offers a lively, surprising and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. The ancient Greeks preferred to choose leaders by lottery and regarded elections as inherently corrupt and undemocratic. The French revolutionaries sought to incarnate the popular will, but many of them came to see the people as the enemy. And in the United States, the franchise would be extended to some, even as it was taken from others.

Nicolas Fiorillo is a brilliant and ambitious 15-year-old from the slums of Naples, eager to make his mark and to acquire power and the money that comes with it. With nine friends, he sets out to create a new paranza, or gang. Together they roam the streets on their motorscooters, learning how to break into the network of small-time hoodlums that controls drug-dealing and petty crime in the city. They learn to cheat and to steal, to shoot semiautomatic pistols and AK-47s. Slowly they begin to wrest control of the neighborhoods from enemy gangs while making alliances with failing old bosses. Nicolas’ strategic brilliance is prodigious, and his cohorts’ rapid rise and envelopment in the ensuing maelstrom of violence and death is riveting and impossible to turn away from.

Candace Chen is a first-generation American who manages the overseas production of specially designed Bibles. She’s so dedicated to her work that she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions begins sweeping the globe. When her free-spirited boyfriend announces that he’s leaving New York, she moves into her abandoned office, sending taskmaster emails in an attempt to fulfill a lucrative contract. But as Shen Fever spreads, she eventually flees her decimated city, joining a small band of fellow survivors led by a power-hungry IT expert named Bob. Sustained by foraged junk food and Xanax, they encounter the wrenching sight of fever-stricken zombies who are trapped in repetitive, mundane acts of daily life.

Anna Roux was a professional dancer who followed the man of her dreams from Paris to Missouri. There, alone with her biggest fears --- imperfection, failure, loneliness --- she spirals down anorexia and depression until she weighs a mere 88 pounds. Forced to seek treatment, she is admitted as a patient at 17 Swann Street, a peach pink house where pale, fragile women with life-threatening eating disorders live. Women like Emm, the veteran; quiet Valerie; Julia, always hungry. Together, they must fight their diseases and face six meals a day. Every bite causes anxiety. Every flavor induces guilt. And every step Anna takes toward recovery will require strength, endurance and the support of the girls at 17 Swann Street.

One evening, Alicia Berenson, a famous painter, shoots her husband Gabriel, an in-demand fashion photographer, five times in the face. Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander --- a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London. Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations --- a search for the truth that threatens to consume him.

With authoritative reporting honed through eight presidencies from Nixon to Obama, author Bob Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside President Donald Trump’s White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies. Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. The focus is on the explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence.

The unexplained disappearance of her mother led Kendall Moreau to become a police officer and pursue a posting in the town where her mother went missing. She is on her way to her first posting when she gets reassigned to a task force in Maple River. There she's partnered with Nate Duncan, whose role on the task force raises suspicions amongst the team because of his family's criminal connections. They are assigned to investigate the death of Sammy Petersen, but Duncan's personal connection to the family and suspects threatens to compromise the investigation. When a routine break-and-enter call produces a second body, Moreau suspects a connection to Sammy's death. After someone breaks into her cabin and assaults her, Moreau is forced to decide who to trust.

While the storm rages over California’s notorious anti-illegal alien Proposition 187, a young woman climbs to the top of the famous Hollywood Sign --- and jumps to her death. An undocumented day laborer is murdered. And a disbarred and desperate lawyer in Venice Beach places an ad in a local paper that says: “Will Do Anything For Money.” Private investigator Duke Rogers takes on the case of Carlos, the murdered day laborer, as a favor to his sister Marisol, the housekeeper down the street from Duke’s house. Duke must figure out what ties together Carlos’ murder, the ex-lawyer’s desperate ad and the woman jumping from the sign. And who is the mysterious “coyote”?