Adult

When LOOSE GIRL author Kerry Cohen reached her early 40s, she realized she had a drinking problem. Yes, she could get up on time, bring her kids to school, make dinner, chat with friends, and all around have a normal day. But, throughout it all, Kerry was waiting for her 5:00 glass of wine. Maybe two glasses. Maybe a bottle. Just enough to blur the edges of her life that had become a monotony of vacuuming, carpooling and disagreements with her husband. What she also realized was: she wasn't the only one. LUSH examines Kerry's struggle with alcohol, a struggle that a rising number of middle-aged women are facing today as alcohol dependency amongst females drastically increases.

Crocker County crowns a new Corn Queen every year, but Jane Willow is the one you would remember. She can't forget Iowa, either. Even though she fled to LA to become a film critic years ago, home was always there behind her. But when a family tragedy happens, she's forced to drive back to Crocker County. The rolling farmlands can't much hide the things she left behind: the best friend she abandoned who now runs a meatloaf hotline, the childhood front porch that sits hauntingly empty, and that fiasco of a Corn Fest that spun her life in a different direction. Before Jane can escape her past a second time, disaster strikes, and she will have to find a way to right her mistakes and save herself from her regrets.

Washington, DC, 1945. Lieutenant Ellis Voigt of the Office of Naval Intelligence is desperate to keep the secrets that threaten his life. The war overseas is going well for America, but Voigt can’t escape a web of double-agents and undercover spies who follow his every move. The FBI suspects that he is the communist who murdered a Naval officer in a Washington back alley. The Soviets believe he’s holding back information from their contacts, and they’re willing to use any means necessary to extract it. When Voigt is sent to New Mexico on a secret mission to identify a Soviet spy, he is tailed by both the FBI and the Russians, and is running out of people he can trust.

Alexandra “Al” Silber seems to have everything. But when her beloved father dies after a decade-long battle with cancer when she is just a teenager, it feels like the end of everything. Lost in grief, Al and her mother hardly know where to begin with the rest of their lives. Into this grieving house burst Al’s three friends from theatre camp, determined to help out as only drama students know how --- and they’re moving in for the duration. Over the course of that winter, the now five-strong household will do battle with everything Death can throw at them. They will learn (almost) everything about love and will eventually return to the world, altered in different ways by their time in a home by a river.

Raised in Dublin by single-minded, careerist parents, Gael Foess learns early how a person’s ambitions and ideals can be compromised --- and she refuses to let her vulnerable, unwell younger brother, Guthrie, suffer such sacrifices. When Gael’s financier father walks out on them during the economic crash of 2008, her family fractures. Her mother, a once-formidable orchestral conductor, becomes a shadow. And a fateful incident prevents Guthrie from finishing high school. Determined not to let her loved ones fall victim to circumstance, Gael leaves Dublin for the coke-dusted social clubs of London and Manhattan’s gallery scene, always working an angle, but beginning to become a stranger to those who love her.

The daughter and granddaughter of prominent Manhattan lawyers, Meredith McKenzie is destined for the best of everything. Spending her childhood in Germany as her father prosecutes Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, Meredith soaks up the conflict between good and evil as it plays out in real time. When her family returns to the United States, she begins blazing her own trail, swimming against the tides, spurred on by her freethinking liberal grandfather, determined to become a lawyer despite her traditional, conservative father’s objections. But when the violence of the era strikes too close to home, her once tightly knit family must survive a devastating loss and rethink their own values and traditions in light of the times.

Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, but her father’s inability to collect his debts has left his family on the edge of poverty --- until Miryem takes matters into her own hands. Hardening her heart, the young woman sets out to claim what is owed and soon gains a reputation for being able to turn silver into gold. When an ill-advised boast draws the attention of the king of the Staryk --- grim fey creatures who seem more ice than flesh --- Miryem’s fate, and that of two kingdoms, will be forever altered. She will face an impossible challenge and, along with two unlikely allies, uncover a secret that threatens to consume the lands of humans and Staryk alike.

Mary Bennet possesses neither the beauty of her eldest sister, Jane, nor the high-spirited wit of second-born Lizzy. Even compared to her frivolous younger siblings, Kitty and Lydia, Mary knows she is lacking in the ways that matter for single, not-so-well-to-do women in 19th-century England who must secure their futures through the finding of a husband. As her sisters wed, one by one, Mary pictures herself growing old, a spinster with no estate to run or children to mind, dependent on the charity of others. At least she has the silent rebellion and secret pleasures of reading and writing to keep her company. But even her fictional creations are no match for the scandal, tragedy and romance that eventually visit Mary’s own life.

A wild party in a gentrifying East Bay neighborhood. A heated argument that spills into the street. Gunshots. Chaos. For Clay Edison and his fellow coroners, it’s the start of a long night and the first of many to come. The victims keep piling up. Then the smoke clears and the real mystery emerges --- one victim’s death doesn’t match the others. And it falls to Clay to give her a name and a voice. Haunted by the cruelty of her death, he embarks upon a journey into the bizarre, entering a hidden world where innocence and perversity meet and mingle. There, his relentless pursuit of the truth opens the gateway to a dark and baffling past --- and brings him right into the line of fire.

The young man is Kailash, from India. His new American friends call him Kalashnikov, AK-47, AK. He takes it all in his stride: he wants to fit in --- and, more than that, to shine. In the narrative of his years at a university in New York, AK describes the joys and disappointments of his immigrant experience; the unfamiliar political and social textures of campus life; the indelible influence of a charismatic professor --- also an immigrant, his personal history as dramatic as AK's is decidedly not; the very different natures of the women he loved, and of himself in and out of love with each of them. Telling his own story, AK is both meditative and the embodiment of the enthusiasm of youth in all its idealism and chaotic desires.