Adult

While Joe Kennedy was grooming his sons for the White House and the Senate, his Stanford-educated daughter, Eunice, was hijacking her father’s fortune and her brothers’ political power to engineer one of the great civil rights movements of our time on behalf of millions of children and adults with intellectual disabilities. Her compassion was born of rage: at the medical establishment that had no answers for her sister Rosemary, at her revered but dismissive father, whose vision for his family did not extend beyond his sons, and at a government that failed to deliver on America’s promise of equality. Now, in EUNICE, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eileen McNamara finally brings Eunice Kennedy Shriver out from her brothers’ shadow.

It’s autumn of 1881, and Inez Stannert, still the co-owner of Leadville, Colorado's Silver Queen saloon, is settled in San Francisco with her young ward, Antonia Gizzi. Inez has turned her business talents to managing a music store, hoping to eventually become an equal partner in the enterprise with the store's owner, a celebrated local violinist. Inez's carefully constructed life for herself and Antonia threatens to tumble about her ears when the badly beaten body of a young musician washes up on the filthy banks of San Francisco's Mission Creek canal. Inez and Antonia become entangled in the mystery of his death when the musician turns out to have ties to Leadville, ties that threaten to expose Inez's notorious past.

At 27, magician Natalie Webb is already a has-been. A card-trick prodigy, she took first place at the World of Magic competition at 18 and has never again reached such heights. Shunned by the magic world after a disastrous liaison with an older magician, she now lives alone in a New Jersey apartment. In a desperate ploy for extra cash, she follows up on an old offer to write for a glossy magazine and pitches the editor a seductive topic: the art of cheating at cards. But when Natalie meets the perfect subject for her piece --- a poker cheat who dazzles at sleight of hand --- what begins as a journalistic gamble soon becomes a test of everything she thinks she knows about her talent, and herself.

How many lives fit in a lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America --- haunted by the political upheaval in the Philippines and disowned by her parents --- she's already on her third. Her uncle gives her a fresh start in the Bay Area, and he doesn't ask about her past. His younger wife knows enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. But their daughter --- the first American-born daughter in the family --- can't resist asking Hero about her damaged hands.

When a passenger jet crashes onto the beaches of Waikiki, bestselling thriller writer Ian Ludlow knows the horrific tragedy wasn’t an accident. Years before, the CIA enlisted Ian to dream up terrorism scenarios to prepare the government for nightmares they couldn’t imagine. Now one of those schemes has come true, and Ian is the only person alive who knows how it was done…and who is behind the plot. That makes him too dangerous to live. Ian goes on the run, sweeping up an innocent bystander in his plight: Margo French, a dog walker and aspiring singer. They are pursued by assassins and an all-seeing global-intelligence network that won’t stop until Ian and Margo are dead.

In CATASTROPHE, renowned Italian short story writer Dino Buzzati brings vividly to life the slow and quietly terrifying collapse of our known, everyday world. From “The Epidemic,” which traces the gradual effects of a “state influenza” that targets those who disagree with the government, to “The Collapse of Baliverna,” where a man puzzles over whether a misstep on his part caused the collapse of a building, Buzzati’s surreal, unsettling tales reckon with the struggle that lies beneath everyday interactions, the sometimes perverse workings of human emotions and desires, and describe the small steps we take as individuals and as a society in our march toward catastrophe.

Baseball, first dubbed the “national pastime” in print in 1856, is the country’s most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the 21st century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball’s greatest charm --- a clockless suspension of time --- is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position --- in reality and myth --- in American culture.

Throughout the 10 stories in her first collection of short fiction, Curtis Sittenfeld upends assumptions about class, relationships and gender roles in a nation that feels both adrift and viscerally divided. In “The World Has Many Butterflies,” married acquaintances play a strangely intimate game with devastating consequences. In “A Regular Couple,” a high-powered lawyer honeymooning with her husband is caught off guard by the appearance of the girl who tormented her in high school. And in “The Prairie Wife,” a suburban mother of two fantasizes about the downfall of an old friend whose wholesome lifestyle empire may or may not be built on a lie.

Carol Evers is a woman with a dark secret. She has died many times, but her deaths are not final: They are comas, a waking slumber indistinguishable from death, each lasting days. Only two people know of Carol’s eerie condition. One is her husband, Dwight, who married Carol for her fortune, and --- when she lapses into another coma --- plots to seize it by proclaiming her dead and quickly burying her…alive. The other is her lost love, the infamous outlaw James Moxie. When word of Carol’s dreadful fate reaches him, Moxie rides the Trail again to save his beloved from an early, unnatural grave. And all the while, Carol fights to free herself from the crippling darkness that binds her.

1910: Twenty-five-year-old Daniel Pitt is a junior barrister in London and eager to prove himself, independent of his renowned parents’ influence. And the new case before him will be the test. When his client, arrogant biographer Russell Graves, is found guilty of murdering his wife, Daniel is dispatched to find the real killer before Graves faces the hangman’s noose --- in only 21 days. Could Mrs. Graves’ violent death have anything to do with her husband’s profession? Someone in power may be framing the biographer to keep damaging secrets from coming to light. It is a theory that leads Daniel’s investigation unexpectedly to London’s Special Branch --- and, disturbingly, to one of his father’s closest colleagues.