Adult

It is 1801, and President Thomas Jefferson has assembled a deep-water navy to fight the growing threat of piracy, as American civilians are regularly kidnapped by Islamist brigands and held for ransom, enslaved or killed, all at their captors’ whim. The Berber States of North Africa, especially Tripoli, claimed their faith gave them the right to pillage anyone who did not submit to their religion. Young Bliven Putnam, great-nephew of Revolutionary War hero Israel Putnam, is bound for the Mediterranean and a desperate battle with the pirate ship Tripoli. He later returns under legendary Commodore Edward Preble on the Constitution, and marches across the Libyan desert with General Eaton to assault Derna --- discovering that the lessons he learns about war, and life, are not what he expected.

Even before she made a name for herself on the silver screen starring in films like Pitch Perfect, Up in the Air, Twilight and Into the Woods, Anna Kendrick was unusually small, weird and “10 percent defiant.” At the ripe age of 13, she had already resolved to “keep the crazy inside my head where it belonged. Forever. But here’s the thing about crazy: It. Wants. Out.” In SCRAPPY LITTLE NOBODY, she invites readers inside her brain, sharing extraordinary and charmingly ordinary stories with candor and winningly wry observations.

Dirk Pitt, the director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, is on the Black Sea, helping to locate a lost Ottoman shipwreck, when he responds to an urgent Mayday from a nearby freighter. But when he and his colleague Al Giordino arrive, there is nobody there --- just dead bodies and a smell of sulfur in the air. The more the two of them search for the secret of the death ship, the deeper they descend into an extraordinary series of discoveries. Meanwhile, Pitt’s two children, marine engineer Dirk and oceanographer Summer, are exploring a mysterious shipwreck of their own, when they are catapulted into his orbit. The three of them are used to perilous situations --- but this time, they may have found their match.

Thinking no one is reading, a blogger who calls herself LBH writes about her most personal feelings, especially her overwhelming loneliness. She goes from day to day showing a brave face to the world while inside she longs to know how it would feel if one person cared about her. Alex Bartlett cares. He’s reading her posts in Daytona Beach, Florida. Nursing his own broken heart and trust issues, he finds himself falling for this sensitive, vulnerable woman whose feelings mirror his own. He ultimately tracks down LBH, a woman who is as beautiful and kind as he imagined she would be. How can he tell her that he knows her secret? What’s holding him back?

Jo Malone began her international fragrance and scented candle business in 1983 from her kitchen, where she made bath oils as thank-you gifts for her facial clients. She opened her first store in London in 1994, and in 1999 she sold the Jo Malone London brand to Estee Lauder Companies. Raised in government-subsidized housing in Kent in the early 1960s, Jo Malone left school as a teenager to care for her mother after she had a stroke. Her at-home beauty business became popular, and word of her talent spread until an international brand was born. After the sale of her company and the birth of her son, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent treatment in New York. Thus began the second chapter of her life, and in this memoir, Jo tells her full amazing and inspiring personal story.

No single sea battle has had more far-reaching consequences than the one fought in the harbor at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in March 1862. The Confederacy, with no fleet of its own, built an iron fort containing 10 heavy guns on the hull of a captured Union frigate named the Merrimack. The North got word of the project when it was already well along, and, in desperation, commissioned an eccentric inventor named John Ericsson to build the Monitor, an entirely revolutionary iron warship. Historian Richard Snow brings to vivid life the tensions of the time, explaining how wooden and ironclad ships worked, maneuvered, battled and sank.

An unidentified body is discovered in New York City, with numbers and symbols written in blood near the corpse. Gilmo, a North Korean national who interprets the world through numbers, formulas and mathematical theories, is arrested on the spot. He used to have a quiet life back in Pyongyang. But when his father, a preeminent doctor, is discovered to be a secret Christian, he is subsequently incarcerated in a political prison overseen by a harsh, cruel warden. There, Gilmo meets the spirited Yeong-ae, who becomes his only friend. When Yeong-ae manages to escape, Gilmo flees to track her down. He uses his peculiar gifts to navigate betrayal and the criminal underworld of east Asia --- a world wholly alien to everything he's ever known.

The beheading of 17-year-old Lady Jane Grey for high treason in the year 1554 sent shockwaves through the Tudor world, and served as a gruesome reminder to all who aspired to a crown that the axe could fall at any time. Set at the time of Jane’s downfall and following her journey through to her trial and execution, each chapter in CROWN OF BLOOD moves between the past and the “present,” using a rich abundance of primary source material (some of which has never been published) in order to paint a vivid picture of Jane’s short and turbulent life.

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’ own work possible. THE UNDOING PROJECT is about a compelling collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures.

A woman is found dead in a cemetery. Just a few days before her death, the victim had received a flower, an unintelligible note, and a photograph of herself. Detective Inspector Irene Huss and her colleagues on the Violent Crimes Unit have neither clue nor motive to pursue, and when similar murders follow, their search for the killer becomes increasingly desperate. Meanwhile, strange things have been going on at home for Irene: first the rose bush in her garden is mangled, then she receives a threatening package with no return address. Is Irene being paranoid, or is she next on the killer’s list?