Adult

Joy Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C. S. Lewis. Their marriage was immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis’s memoir, A GRIEF OBSERVED. Now, through extraordinary new documents as well as years of research and interviews, Abigail Santamaria brings Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis to the page in the fullness and depth she deserves.

INTO THE VALLEY opens on the day in July 1967 when B. decides to pass her first counterfeit check and flee San Francisco for the Central Valley. Caught between generations and unmarried at 30, B. doesn’t understand the new counterculture youths. She likes the dresses and kid gloves of her mother’s generation, but doesn’t fit into that world either. B. is beset by a disintegrative anxiety she calls “the carsickness,” and the only relief comes in handling illicit checks and driving endlessly through the valley.

Edith is a widowed landlady who rents apartments in her Brooklyn brownstone to an unlikely collection of humans, all deeply in need of shelter. Crippled in various ways --- in spirit, in mind, in body, in heart --- the renters struggle to navigate daily existence. They come to realize that Edith’s deteriorating mind, and the menacing presence of her estranged, unscrupulous son, Owen, is the greatest challenge they must confront together.

Who are you? you must be wondering. I am your soulmate, your old friend, and I have come back to this city of sixteen million in search of you. So begins the first letter that falls into Wang’s lap as he flips down the visor in his taxi. The letters that follow are filled with the stories of his previous lives. As the letters continue to appear seemingly out of thin air, Wang becomes convinced that someone is watching him --- someone who claims to have known him for over a thousand years. And with each letter, he feels the watcher growing closer and closer.

Emigrating from Egypt, Samir and Nagla Al-Menshawy were determined to live the American dream. After years of hard work, Samir set up his own medical practice and the family moved to an upscale New Jersey suburb. But when a devastating turn of events leaves their eldest son and their neighbors’ daughter dead, all their years of success begin to unravel. The Al-Menshawys become pariahs in the neighborhood, and whether through religion, work or friendship, each family member struggles to move forward in his or her own way.

Letting go of her ex-husband is harder than wedding-dress designer Jenny Tate expected…especially since his new wife wants to be Jenny's new best friend. So Jenny decides to move back to her hometown, where she'll start her own business, bask in her sister Rachel's picture-perfect family life, and maybe even find a little romance of her own with Leo, her downstairs neighbor. Rachel's idyllic marriage, however, is imploding after she discovers her husband sexting with a colleague.

Grounded in place, spanning the Civil War to the present day, the stories in I WAS A REVOLUTIONARY capture the roil of history through the eyes of an unforgettable cast of characters: the visionaries and dreamers, radical farmers and socialist journalists, quack doctors and protestors who haunt the past and present landscape of the state of Kansas. In the collection’s haunting title piece, a professor of Kansas history surveys his decades-long slide from radicalism to complacency, a shift that parallels the landscape around him.

On New Year’s Eve, journalist and former Parade Editor-in-Chief Janice Kaplan makes a promise to be grateful and look on the bright side of whatever happens. She realizes that how she feels over the next months will have less to do with the events that occur than her own attitude and perspective. Relying on both amusing personal experiences and extensive research, Kaplan explores how gratitude can transform every aspect of life, including marriage and friendship, money and ambition, health and fitness.

Twelve years after a kidnapping destroyed former US Marshal Simon Fisk's family, he is newly determined to find the people responsible for taking his then-six-year-old daughter. He refuses to step away from the cold case, even after enduring months of dead ends and frustration. And then, at last, he gets a break. On a brutal January night, Simon finds an urgent message on his computer. Within a matter of hours, he is on a flight to Dublin, setting off to find a girl who may be Hailey Fisk --- before she's arrested for murder.

Paloma Batton is the granddaughter of Spanish refugees who fled Barcelona after the Civil War. She lets little get in the way of her career until she receives a mysterious pair of golden earrings. She begins exploring her Spanish heritage and becomes fascinated by la Rusa, a woman who rose from poverty to become one of the great flamenco dancers of modern times before committing suicide. As Paloma begins to unravel the secrets of the past, she discovers more than one person who had good reason for wanting la Rusa dead --- including Paloma’s own grandmother.