Adult

Catherine doesn’t bury the dead. She rescues the living --- from intolerable, abusive, dangerous lives. Her darknet-based witness protection program, the Burial Society, is the last hope for people who desperately need to disappear. Catherine takes care of them and provides new identities. She is effective and efficient --- until she discovers that her slip-up may have compromised a client and maybe even killed her. Powerless to help without exposing her shadowy profession, Catherine makes a drastic move. With her covert service relocated to Paris, she has done her best to move on. But when a dark part of her past suddenly appears in the City of Light, she refuses to run --- and her life takes a harrowing turn.

THE LARGESSE OF THE SEA MAIDEN is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson. Written in the luminous prose that made him one of the most beloved and important writers of his generation, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating the ghosts of the past and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves. Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come.

On a dead-end street in a run-down suburb, there is a music shop that is jam-packed with records of every kind. Like a beacon, the shop attracts the lonely, the sleepless and the adrift; Frank, the shop’s owner, has a way of connecting his customers with just the piece of music they need. Then, one day, into his shop comes a beautiful young woman, Ilse Brauchmann, who asks Frank to teach her about music. Terrified of real closeness, Frank feels compelled to turn and run, yet he is drawn to this strangely still, mysterious woman with eyes as black as vinyl. But Ilse is not what she seems, and Frank has old wounds that threaten to reopen, as well as a past it seems he will never leave behind.

Mokhtar Alkhanshali is 24 and working as a doorman when he discovers the astonishing history of coffee and Yemen’s central place in it. He leaves San Francisco and travels deep into his ancestral homeland to tour terraced farms high in the country’s rugged mountains and meet beleaguered but determined farmers. But when war engulfs the country and Saudi bombs rain down, Mokhtar has to find a way out of Yemen without sacrificing his dreams or abandoning his people.

Hugh Legat is a rising star of the British diplomatic service, serving at 10 Downing Street as a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Rikard von Holz is on the staff of the German Foreign Office --- and secretly a member of the anti-Hitler resistance. The two men were friends at Oxford in the 1920s, but have not been in contact since. Now, when Hugh flies with Chamberlain from London to Munich, and Rikard travels on Hitler's train overnight from Berlin, their paths are set on a disastrous collision course.

Winter. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. And now Art’s mother is seeing things. Come to think of it, Art is seeing things himself. When four people, strangers and family, converge on a 15-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone? Winter. It makes things visible. Ali Smith’s shapeshifting WINTER casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.

In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same. In 2016, Eddie is fully grown and thinks he has put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank…until one of them turns up dead.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill followed in their mother Janet’s footsteps after her marriages to the philandering socialite “Black Jack” Bouvier and the fabulously rich Standard Oil heir Hugh D. Auchincloss. Jacqueline would marry John F. Kennedy, and the story of their marriage is legendary, as is the story of her second marriage to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Less well known is the story of her love affair with a world-renowned architect and a British peer. Jackie's sister, Lee, had liaisons with one and possibly both of Jackie's husbands, in addition to her own three marriages --- to an illegitimate royal, a Polish prince and a Hollywood director.

On a chilly February night, during a screening of Psycho in midtown, someone sunk an ice pick into the back of Chanel Rylan’s neck. As Eve Dallas puzzles over a homicide that seems carefully planned and yet oddly personal, she receives a tip from an unexpected source: an author of police thrillers who recognizes the crime --- from the pages of her own book. The good news is that Eve and her billionaire husband, Roarke, have an excuse to curl up in front of the fireplace with their cat, Galahad, reading mystery stories for research. The bad news is that time is running out before the next victim plays an unwitting role in a murderer’s deranged private drama.

His name is Evan Smoak. Taken from a group home at age 12, he was raised and trained as an off-the-books government assassin: Orphan X. After breaking with the Orphan Program, Evan disappeared and reinvented himself as the Nowhere Man, a man spoken about only in whispers and dedicated to helping the truly desperate. Now, the person in need of help is Jack Johns, the man who raised and trained him, and the only father Evan has ever known. Secret government forces are busy trying to scrub the remaining assets and traces of the Orphan Program, and they have finally tracked down Jack. With little time remaining, and an elusive new enemy on his trail, Jack gives Evan his final assignment: to find and protect his last protégé and recruit for the program --- or die trying.